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   Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:32 JST Leonard Ritter

   today i'm beginning translating Scopes' internal OOP based system to datalog/database/ECS layout, that is, all pointers become enum-typed indices and object attributes are mapped in arrays.

   to begin, i'm writing a small DSL in Scopes to describe the datamodel, and then auto-translate it to C++

   this is the type tree from which classes and enums will be generated:
   https://paste.sr.ht/~duangle/31522a60cf978fe7483cfdd32f1fca7293daaffc

   next, we need index attributes (aka struct fields), and auxiliary tables (options, maps)

   #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:15 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     still refactoring prover.cpp. for every reported compiler error i see i fix all similar patterns in the file, and yet i am still at line 1703 of 4390 (38%). but through this method, progress should be exponential-- or wait, this pattern matches the one of the sieve of eratosthenes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes), so progress should follow the distribution of "new problems" in the file (each problem equivalent to a prime). it's interesting to think about

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:16 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     lists done, platform ABI done. now we get to prover.cpp which is the typechecker, and at 4500 lines a behemoth, compared to other files.

     i wrote down a few regexes i used for replacement here, which save me a lot busy work.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:17 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     getting to list.cpp. the existing implementation uses simple cons cells, and while i want to use something else in the future, i'll keep it as it is right now so we're going to get to working state sooner.

     what i would like to try in the next list impl is "wide cons cells", conceptually immutable arrays broken into multiple singly-linked pieces.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:18 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     more refactoring. this is the mother of all refactorings. i will probably never get done.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:19 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     wrote some great sugar for the boundary so there's virtually no sweat translating exceptions.

     first pic is old way, second pic is new way

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:20 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     i'm going to remove all the internal "homebrew exception" stuff from our C++ codebase and use C++ exceptions instead, which drastically simplifies a lot of the error handling code. we're already converting exceptions at the boundaries, this would be no different.

     honestly i no longer understand why i was so reluctant to use this in the first place. i guess i was afraid C++ exception support would leak into the scopes API but those worries were unfounded.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:21 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     refactoring is intensifying

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:22 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     and now it's time to eat my own dogfood

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:23 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     de-optimizing Scope objects to speed the refactor along (I have a much better optimization to apply later), and updating related API functions.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:24 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     gen_llvm.cpp is updated, next is globals.cpp. this one implements the C API wrapper around the C++ parts of the compiler and also exports all API symbols to the client context, which looks like below.

     these 600+ lines of definitions are all manually maintained, but could be autogenerated from scopes.h alone, which i'll implement now.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:25 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     expander.cpp is the first big module to be fully updated, now i'm updating gen_llvm.cpp. it's the mother of all refactorings.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:26 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     voting this the least helpful error message in C++ (it's a bit verbose because i use heavily templated types, and C++ doesn't know when to quit describing nesting structures).

     you get this when you use a type for STL hashmaps that's not supported by std::hash. it doesn't actually tell you where you made that mistake. it does in fact tell you nothing useful aside from the type used. you just have to know by experience.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:27 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     lots of refactoring today. codebase is completely shot. changes everywhere. many deletions. into the rabbit hole i go.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:28 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     in full refactoring flow now, as i replace explicit classes with generated types, turn methods into functions, figure out small extensions to the type generator, etc.

     as a result, codebase's getting smaller, which is always a good sign.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:29 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     we have generated some code. instead of generating plain C++ expressions i employ the same technique i did with the scopes² prototype: generate macro expressions and let the preprocessor translate.

     left is an impression of what the output looks like (header file). right is the file used to translate it to C definitions. most of it is stubs so the code compiles at all.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:30 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     the parser for Value.sx now fully parses the definition file in 455 lines.

     https://hg.sr.ht/~duangle/scopes/raw/lib/scopes/compiler/pilot/gencc.sc?rev=based

     now we need to generate some actual C++ code.

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:31 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     phew. five hours later, i've translated *all types* used by Scopes into this format, from which C++ definitions will be derived.

     what i like particularly here is that all sub-enums like ICmpKind or TypeKind, and even all error codes, are flattened into the main ValueKind one, but can still be their own enumerator types.

     many branch-dependent special cases are now unified this way.

     https://hg.sr.ht/~duangle/scopes/browse/src/Value.sx?rev=based

     #devlog #scopes

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     Leonard Ritter (lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 02-May-2025 07:16:40 JST Leonard Ritter

     in reply to

     hating myself right now for having written so much code.

     a lot of this was written with the assumption that "it's only bootstrapping, no need to be dilligent, all this will be replaced".

     well guess what, dipshit. it's 10 years later and this is still the state of the art implementation.

     in soviet russia, corner cuts you.

     #devlog #scopes