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 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.
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).
We're still missing predicates (need to be able to call functions for that
one) and assignments into dictionaries. But we now can deconstruct a list
and check against constants.
So things like this work now:
[1 foo ~bar [a b]] = [1 "Hello" 2 3 4 [5 6]]
# foo is: "Hello"
# bar is: [2 3 4]
# a is: 5
# b is: 6
Pretty cool :)
Increasing the refcount (confusingly called copy before, fixed that too)
didn't work properly, as the object was copied and the refcount was only
updated in one of the copies.
This avoids copying the string every time we pass it around. Not too
important right now, but will become important onve we're able to evaluate
more complex expressions.
It's really easy to accidentally pass an uninitialized string as dst into
the copy function, which will result in an free() call to an arbitrary
pointer. Maybe it's a better idea to not deinit the dst string before
copying? The documentation at least makes it more clear and the new
apfl_string_blank() function makes it easy to create an empty string.
