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- Previously, there were a variety of rules in `check.cpp` to pick the conversion cost for various cases involving scalar, vector, and matrix types.
- The main problem of the previous approach is that any lowering pass would need to convert an arbitrary "type cast" node into the right low-level operation(s).
- The new approach is that a type conversion (implicit or explicit) always resolves as a call to a constructor/initializer for the destination type. This means that the existing rules around marking operations as builtins should work for lowering.
- The support this, the checking logic needs to perform lookup of intializers/constructors when asked to perform conversion between types. It does this by re-using the existing logic for lookup and overload resolution if/when a type was applied in an ordinary context.
- Next, we define a modifier that can be attached to constructors/initializers to mark them as suitable for implicit conversion, and associate them with the correct cost to be used when doing overload comparisons.
- We add the modifier to all the scalar-to-scalar cases in the stdlib, using the logic that previously existed in semantic checking.
- Next we add cases for general vector-to-scalar conversions that also convert type, using the same cost computation as above.
- This probably misses various cases, but at this point they can hopefully be added just in the stdlib.
- One gotcha here is that in lowering, we need to make sure to lower any kind of call expression to another call expression of the same AST node class, so that we don't lose information on what casts were implicit/hidden in teh source-to-source case.
Two notes for potential longer-term changes:
1. There is still some duplication between the type conversion declarations here and the "join" logic for types used for generic arguments. Ideally we'd eventually clean up the "join" logic to be based on convertability, but that isn't a high priority right now, as long as joins continue to pick the right type.
2. It is a bit gross to have to declare all the N^2 conversions for vector/matrix types to duplicate the cases for scalars. For the simple scalar-to-vector case, we might try to support multiple conversion "steps" where both a scalar-to-scalar and a scalar-to-vector step can be allowed (this could be tagged on the modifiers already introduced). That simple option doesn't scale to vector-to-vector element type conversions, though, where you'd really want to make it a generic with a constraint like:
vector<T,N> init<U>(vector<U,N> value) where T : ConvertibleFrom<U>;
Here the `ConvertibleFrom<U>` interface expresses the fact that a conforming type has an initializer that takes a `U`. What doesn't appear in this context is any notion of conversion costs. We'd need some kind of system for computing the conversion cost of the vector conversion from the cost of the `T` to `U` converion.
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Fixes #23
Up to this point, the compiler has used the ordinary `String` type to represent declaration names, which means a bunch of lookup structures throughout the compiler were string-to-whatever maps, which can reduce efficiency.
It also means that things like the `Token` type end up carying a `String` by value and paying for things like reference-counting.
This change adds a `Name` type that is used to represent names of variables, types, macros, etc.
Names are cached and unique'd globally for a session, and the string-to-name mapping gets done during lexing.
From that point on, most mapping is from pointers, which should make all the various table lookups faster.
More importantly (possibly), this brings us one step closer to being able to pool-allocate the AST nodes.
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This is in preparation for using `Name` as a type name.
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Fixes #24
So far the code has used a representation for source locations that is heavy-weight, but typical of research or hobby compilers: a `struct` type containing a line number and a (heap-allocated) string.
This is actually very convenient for debugging, but it means that any data structure that might contain a source location needs careful memory management (because of those strings) and has a tendency to bloat.
The new represnetation is that a source location is just a pointer-sized integer.
In the simplest mental model, you can think of this as just counting every byte of source text that is passed in, and using those to name locations.
Finding the path and line number that corresponds to a location involves a lookup step, but we can arrange to store all the files in an array sorted by their start locations, and do a binary search.
Finding line numbers inside a file is similarly fast (one you pay a one-time cost to build an array of starting offsets for lines).
More advanced compilers like clang actually go further and create a unique range of source locations to represent a file each time it gets included, so that they can track the include stack and reproduce it in diagnostic messages.
I'm not doing anything that clever here.
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- `ExpressionSyntaxNode` becomes `Expr`
- `StatementSyntaxNode` becomes `Stmt`
- `StructSyntaxNode` becomes `StructDecl`
- `ProgramSyntaxNode` becomes `ModuleDecl`
- `ExpressionType` becomes `Type`
- Existing fields names `Type` become `type`
- There might be some collateral damage here if there were, e.g., `enum`s named `Type`, but I can live with that for now and fix those up as a I see them
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The so-called "lowering" pass (really a kind of AST-to-AST legalization pass right now) needs to handle some basic scalarization of structured types, and it does this by inventing what I call "pseuo-expressions" and "pseudo-declarations."
For example, there is a pseudo-expression node type that represents a tuple of N other expressions, and certain operations act element-wise over such tuples.
The problem was that the implementation introduced these out-of-band expression/declaration types into the existing AST hierarchy which led to a dilemma:
- If these new AST nodes were declared like all the others (and integrated into the visitor dispatch approach, etc.) then every pass would need to deal with them even though they are meant to be a transient implementation detail of this one pass
- But if the new nodes *aren't* declared like the others, then they can't meaningfully interact with visitor dispatch, and will just crash the compiler if they somehow "leak" through to latter passes. And because they are just ordinary AST nodes from a C++ type-system perspective, such leaking is entirely possible (if not probable)
Hopefully that setup helps make the solution clear: instead of having the "lowering" pass map an expression to an expression, it needs to map an expression to a new data type (here called `LoweredExpr`) that can wrap *either* an ordinary expression (the common case) or one of the new out-of-band values. Any code that accepts a `LoweredExpr` needs to handle all the cases, or explicitly decide that it can't/won't deal with anything other than ordinary expressions.
Most of the code changes are straightforward at that point, although the whole "lowering" approach is a bit fiddly right now, so gertting the tests passing took a bit of attention. I'm not sure our test coverage of all this code is great, so I wouldn't be surprised if some failures are lurking still.
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There were two main places where global variables were used in the Slang implementation:
1. The "standard library" code was generated as a string at run-time, and stored in a global variable so that it could be amortized across compiles.
2. The representation of types uses some globals (well, class `static` members) to store common types (e.g., `void`) and to deal with memory lifetime for things like canonicalized types.
In each case the "simple" fix is to move the relevant state into the `Session` type that controlled their lifetime already (the `Session` destructor was already cleaning up these globals to avoid leaks).
For the standard library stuff this really was easy, but for the types it required threading through the `Session` a bit carefully.
One more case that I found: there was a function-`static` variable used to generate a unique ID for files output when dumping of intermediates is enabled (this is almost strictly a debugging option).
Rather than make this counter per-session (which would lead to different sessions on different threads clobbering the same few files), I went ahead and used an atomic in this case.
Note that the remaining case I had been worried about was any function-`static` counter that might be used in generating unique names.
It turns out that right now the parser doesn't use such a counter (even in cases where it probably should), and the lowering pass already uses a counter local to the pass (again, whether or not this is a good idea).
This change should be a major step toward allowing an application to use Slang in multiple threads, so long as each thread uses a distinct `SlangSession`. The case of using a single session across multiple threads is harder to support, and will require more careful implementation work.
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The change is mostly about trying to make sure the compiler "fails safe" when it encounters an internal assumption that isn't met.
Most internal errors will now throw exceptions (yes, exceptions are evil, but this will work for now), and these get caught in `spCompile` so that they don't propagate to the user (they just see a message that compilation aborted due to an internal error).
Subsequent changes are going to need to work on diagnosing as many of these situations as possible, so that users can at least know what construct in their code was unexpected or unhandled by the compiler.
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- The big change here is that all the definitions for syntax-node classes have been macro-ized, to that we can do light metaprogramming over them
- The use of macros for this has big down-sides, but I'm not quite ready to do anything more heavy-weight right now
- The macro-ized definitions can be included multiple times, to generate different declarations/code as needed
- The first example of using this meta-programming facility is a new visitor system
- The actual visitor base classes and the dispatch logic are all generated from the meta-files
- There was only one visitor left in the code: the semantics checker, so that was ported to the new system.
- All current test cases pass, so *of course* that means all is well.
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