025c67bf4d
Warning: This is probably the biggest refactor in tvix-eval history, so far. This replaces all instances of trampolines and recursion during evaluation of the VM loop with generators. A generator is an asynchronous function that can be suspended to yield a message (in our case, vm::generators::GeneratorRequest) and receive a response (vm::generators::GeneratorResponsee). The `genawaiter` crate provides an interpreter for generators that can drive their execution and lets us move control flow between the VM and suspended generators. To do this, massive changes have occured basically everywhere in the code. On a high-level: 1. The VM is now organised around a frame stack. A frame is either a call frame (execution of Tvix bytecode) or a generator frame (a running or suspended generator). The VM has an outer loop that pops a frame off the frame stack, and then enters an inner loop either driving the execution of the bytecode or the execution of a generator. Both types of frames have several branches that can result in the frame re-enqueuing itself, and enqueuing some other work (in the form of a different frame) on top of itself. The VM will eventually resume the frame when everything "above" it has been suspended. In this way, the VM's new frame stack takes over much of the work that was previously achieved by recursion. 2. All methods previously taking a VM have been refactored into async functions that instead emit/receive generator messages for communication with the VM. Notably, this includes *all* builtins. This has had some other effects: - Some test have been removed or commented out, either because they tested code that was mostly already dead (nix_eq) or because they now require generator scaffolding which we do not have in place for tests (yet). - Because generator functions are technically async (though no async IO is involved), we lose the ability to use much of the Rust standard library e.g. in builtins. This has led to many algorithms being unrolled into iterative versions instead of iterator combinations, and things like sorting had to be implemented from scratch. - Many call sites that previously saw a `Result<..., ErrorKind>` bubble up now only see the result value, as the error handling is encapsulated within the generator loop. This reduces number of places inside of builtin implementations where error context can be attached to calls that can fail. Currently what we gain in this tradeoff is significantly more detailed span information (which we still need to bubble up, this commit does not change the error display). We'll need to do some analysis later of how useful the errors turn out to be and potentially introduce some methods for attaching context to a generator frame again. This change is very difficult to do in stages, as it is very much an "all or nothing" change that affects huge parts of the codebase. I've tried to isolate changes that can be isolated into the parent CLs of this one, but this change is still quite difficult to wrap one's mind and I'm available to discuss it and explain things to any reviewer. Fixes: b/238, b/237, b/251 and potentially others. Change-Id: I39244163ff5bbecd169fe7b274df19262b515699 Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/8104 Reviewed-by: raitobezarius <tvl@lahfa.xyz> Reviewed-by: Adam Joseph <adam@westernsemico.com> Tested-by: BuildkiteCI |
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| proptest-regressions/value | ||
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| build.rs | ||
| Cargo.toml | ||
| default.nix | ||
| README.md | ||
Tvix Evaluator
This project implements an interpreter for the Nix programming language. You can experiment with an online version of the evaluator: tvixbolt.
The interpreter aims to be compatible with nixpkgs, on the
foundation of Nix 2.3.
Important note: The evaluator is not yet feature-complete, and while the core mechanisms (compiler, runtime, ...) have stabilised somewhat, a lot of components are still changing rapidly.
Please contact TVL with any questions you might have.
Building tvix-eval
Please check the README.md one level up for instructions on how to build this.
The evaluator itself can also be built with standard Rust tooling (i.e. cargo build).
If you would like to clone only the evaluator and build it directly with Rust tooling, you can do:
git clone https://code.tvl.fyi/depot.git:/tvix/eval.git tvix-eval
cd tvix-eval && cargo build
Nix test suite
C++ Nix implements a language test suite in the form of Nix source code files, and their expected output. The coverage of this test suite is not complete, but we intend to be compatible with it.
We have ported the test suite to Tvix, but do not run it by default as we are not yet compatible with it.
You can run the test suite by enabling the nix_tests feature in
Cargo:
cargo test --features nix_tests
rnix-parser
Tvix is written in memory of jD91mZM2, the author of rnix-parser who sadly passed away.
Tvix makes heavy use of rnix-parser in its bytecode compiler. The parser is now maintained by Nix community members.