1e80b9ea8b
Given Rust's current lack of support for tail calls, we cannot avoid using `async` for builtins. This is the only way to avoid overflowing the cpu stack when we have arbitrarily deep builtin/interpreted/builtin/interpreted/... "sandwiches" There are only five `async fn` functions which are not builtins (some come in multiple "flavors"): - add_values - resolve_with - force, final_deep_force - nix_eq, nix_cmp_eq - coerce_to_string These can be written iteratively rather than recursively (and in fact nix_eq used to be written that way!). I volunteer to rewrite them. If written iteratively they would no longer need to be `async`. There are two motivations for limiting our reliance on `async` to only the situation (builtins) where we have no other choice: 1. Performance. We don't really have any good measurement of the performance hit that the Box<dyn Future>s impose on us. Right now all of our large (nixpkgs-eval) tests are swamped by the cost of other things (e.g. fork()ing `nix-store`) so we can't really measure it. Builtins tend to be expensive operations anyways (regexp-matching, sorting, etc) that are likely to already cost more than the `async` overhead. 2. Preserving the ability to switch to `musttail` calls. Clang/LLVM recently got `musttail` (mandatory-elimination tail calls). Rust has refused to add this mainly because WASM doesn't support, but WASM `tail_call` has been implemented and was recently moved to phase 4 (standardization). It is very likely that Rust will get tail calls sometime in the next year; if it does, we won't need async anymore. In the meantime, I'd like to avoid adding any further reliance on `async` in places where it wouldn't be straightforward to replace it with a tail call. https://reviews.llvm.org/D99517 https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/pull/157 https: //github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/2691#issuecomment-1462152908 Change-Id: Id15945d5a92bf52c16d93456e3437f91d93bdc57 Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/8290 Reviewed-by: tazjin <tazjin@tvl.su> Tested-by: BuildkiteCI Autosubmit: Adam Joseph <adam@westernsemico.com> |
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|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| .vscode | ||
| cli | ||
| docs | ||
| eval | ||
| nix-compat | ||
| nix_cli | ||
| proto | ||
| serde | ||
| store | ||
| verify-lang-tests | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| Cargo.lock | ||
| Cargo.nix | ||
| Cargo.toml | ||
| crate-hashes.json | ||
| default.nix | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| OWNERS | ||
| README.md | ||
Tvix
Tvix is a new implementation of the Nix language and package manager. See the announcement post for information about the background of this project.
Tvix is developed by TVL in our monorepo, the depot, at
//tvix. Code reviews take place on Gerrit, bugs are
filed in our issue tracker.
For more information about Tvix, feel free to reach out. We are interested in people who would like to help us review designs, brainstorm and describe requirements that we may not yet have considered.
Most of the discussion around development happens on our IRC channel, which you can join in several ways documented on tvl.fyi, or on our mailing list.
Contributions to Tvix follow the TVL review flow and contribution guidelines.
WARNING: Tvix is not ready for use in production. None of our current APIs should be considered stable in any way.
WARNING: Any other instances of this project or repository are
josh-mirrors. We do not accept code contributions or issues outside of
the tooling and communication methods outlined above.
Components
This folder contains the following components:
//tvix/eval- an implementation of the Nix programming language//tvix/nix-compat- library functions for compatibility with C++ Nix//tvix/cli- preliminary REPL & CLI implementation for Tvix//tvix/serde- Rust library for using the Nix language for app configuration//tvix/store- implementation of a file store for Tvix
Some additional folders with auxiliary things exist and can be explored at your leisure.
Building the CLI
The CLI can also be built with standard Rust tooling (i.e. cargo build),
as long as you are in a shell with the right dependencies.
- If you cloned the full monorepo, it can be provided by
mg shell //tvix:shell. - If you cloned the
tvixworkspace only (git clone https://code.tvl.fyi/depot.git:workspace=views/tvix.git),nix-shellprovides it.
If you're in the TVL monorepo, you can also run mg build //tvix/cli
(or mg build from inside that folder) for a more incremental build.
Please follow the depot-wide instructions on how to get mg and use the depot
tooling.
Compatibility
Important note: We only use and test Nix builds of our software against Nix 2.3. There are a variety of bugs and subtle problems in newer Nix versions which we do not have the bandwidth to address, builds in newer Nix versions may or may not work.
Rust projects, crate2nix
Some parts of Tvix are written in Rust. To simplify the dependency
management on the Nix side of these builds, we use crate2nix in a
single Rust workspace in //tvix to maintain the Nix build
configuration.
When making changes to Cargo dependency configuration in any of the
Rust projects under //tvix, be sure to run
mg run //tvix:crate2nixGenerate -- in //tvix itself and commit the changes
to the generated Cargo.nix file. This only applies to the full TVL checkout.
License structure
All code implemented for Tvix is licensed under the GPL-3.0, with the exception of the protocol buffer definitions used for communication between services which are available under a more permissive license (MIT).
The idea behind this structure is that any direct usage of our code (e.g. linking to it, embedding the evaluator, etc.) will fall under the terms of the GPL3, but users are free to implement their own components speaking these protocols under the terms of the MIT license.