We can now define and call functions. Lexical closure scopes are also
working :).
It's limited to simple functions or complex functions with a single
argument list of only variable names for now.
The new roots callback mechanism makes it possible to traverse the gc
objects on the stack without needing the stack to be an gc object.
This also uncovered a nasty bug in apfl_stack_pop where we passed in a
wrong mem pointer into apfl_resizable_splice. We should probably find a way
to make the apfl_resizable_* functions a bit safer, the need for casting
stuff to void** easily hides errors.
This let's us get rid of that awkward hashmap in the GC that was used as a
set, makes determining the roots more flexible and now gc_init can't even
fail any more, as there are no allocations happening here any more :)
This way we can see the parse errors again in evaluation mode
Not fully fleshed out yet: We simply use apfl_debug_print_val to dump the
top of the stack (the formatted error) to stderr but don't nicely handle
if there is nothing on the stack (apfl_debug_print_val will print a rather
cryptic "stack index invalid" error). Also the whole dance we need to do to
put the formatted error onto the stack feels rather awkward (there should
probably a function for this) and we also should probably try to push an
error description on the stack in case this moving-string-to-stack business
fails.
Now "only" all other errors need to be put on the stack as a string :)
The callback and the opaque data are now grouped together in a struct
instead of being passed individually into the tokenizer.
This also exposes the string source reader struct and therefore removes
the need of heap allocating it. Neat!
- peek functions will now return pointers directly
- cursor access methods can now return an error, if the cursor is already
at the end
Also rewrote some cursor loops to use the HASHMAP_EACH macro.
Instead of the previous refcount base garbage collection, we're now using
a basic tri-color mark&sweep collector. This is done to support cyclical
value relationships in the future (functions can form cycles, all values
implemented up to this point can not).
The collector maintains a set of roots and a set of objects (grouped into
blocks). The GC enabled objects are no longer allocated manually, but will
be allocated by the GC. The GC also wraps an allocator, this way the GC
knows, if we ran out of memory and will try to get out of this situation by
performing a full collection cycle.
The tri-color abstraction was chosen for two reasons:
- We don't have to maintain a list of objects that need to be marked, we
can simply grab the next grey one.
- It should allow us to later implement incremental collection (right now
we only do a stop-the-world collection).
This also switches to a bytecode based evaluation of the code: We no longer
directly evaluate the AST, but first compile it into a series of
instructions, that are evaluated in a separate step. This was done in
preparation for inplementing functions: We only need to turn a function
body into instructions instead of evaluating the node again with each call
of the function. Also, since an instruction list is implemented as a GC
object, this then removes manual memory management of the function body and
it's child nodes. Since the GC and the bytecode go hand in hand, this was
done in one (giant) commit.
As a downside, we've now lost the ability do do list matching on
assignments. I've already started to work on implementing this in the new
architecture, but left it out of this commit, as it's already quite a large
commit :)
We didn't properly copy the opaque value before (a heap-allocated allocator
pointer), resulting in a use-after-free of the opaque on the copied map if
the old map was destroyed.
We now no longer call malloc/free/... directly, but use an allocator object
that is passed around.
This was mainly done as a preparation for a garbage collector: The
collector will need to know, how much memory we're using, introducing the
collector abstraction will allow the GC to hook into the memory allocation
and observe the memory usage.
This has other potential applications:
- We could now be embedded into applications that can't use the libc
allocator.
- There could be an allocator that limits the total amount of used memory,
e.g. for sandboxing purposes.
- In our tests we could use this to simulate out of memory conditions
(implement an allocator that fails at the n-th allocation, increase n by
one and restart the test until there are no more faked OOM conditions).
The function signature of the allocator is basically exactly the same as
the one Lua uses.
Only for evaluating expressions for now and right now the only exposed
operation is to debug print a value on the stack, this obviously needs to
be expanded.
I've done this for two reasons:
1. A Lua-style stack API is much nicer to work with than to manually manage
refcounts.
2. We'll soon need a more sophisticated garbage collector (if you even want
to count the refcounting as garbage collection). For this, the GC will
need root objects to start tracing for live objects, the stack will be
one of these roots.
This avoids creating refcounted strings during evaluation and makes it
easier to use the same parsed string in multiple places (should be
useful once we implement functions).
You can now set keys in dictionaries to a value. If a key in a key path is
missing, we automatically create an empty dictionary. Otherwise setting
deeply nested keys becomes annoying.
