8616f13a71
CL/6867 added support for builtins.import, which required a cyclic reference import->globals->builtins->import. This was implemented using a RefCell, which makes it possible to mutate the builtins during evaluation. The commit message for CL/6867 expressed a desire to eliminate this possibility: This opens up a potentially dangerous footgun in which we could mutate the builtins at runtime leading to different compiler invocations seeing different builtins, so it'd be nice to have some kind of "finalised" status for them or some such, but I'm not sure how to represent that atm. This CL replaces the RefCell with Rc::new_cyclic(), making the globals/builtins immutable once again. At VM runtime (once opcodes start executing) everything is the same as before this CL, except that the Rc<RefCell<>> introduced by CL/6867 is turned into an rc::Weak<>. The function passed to Rc::new_cyclic works very similarly to overlays in nixpkgs: a function takes its own result as an argument. However instead of laziness "breaking the cycle", Rust's Rc::new_cyclic() instead uses an rc::Weak. This is done to prevent memory leaks rather than divergence. This CL also resolves the following TODO from CL/6867: // TODO: encapsulate this import weirdness in builtins The main disadvantage of this CL is the fact that the VM now must ensure that it holds a strong reference to the globals while a program is executing; failure to do so will cause a panic when the weak reference in the builtins is upgrade()d. In theory it should be possible to create strong reference cycles the same way Rc::new_cyclic() creates weak cycles, but these cycles would cause a permanent memory leak -- without either an rc::Weak or RefCell there is no way to break the cycle. At some point we will have to implement some form of cycle collection; whatever library we choose for that purpose is likely to provide an "immutable strong reference cycle" primitive similar to Rc::new_cyclic(), and we should be able to simply drop it in. Signed-off-by: Adam Joseph <adam@westernsemico.com> Change-Id: I34bb5821628eb97e426bdb880b02e2097402adb7 Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/7097 Tested-by: BuildkiteCI Reviewed-by: tazjin <tazjin@tvl.su> |
||
|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| benches | ||
| docs | ||
| proptest-regressions/value | ||
| src | ||
| tests | ||
| .envrc | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .skip-subtree | ||
| build.rs | ||
| Cargo.lock | ||
| Cargo.toml | ||
| default.nix | ||
| README.md | ||
| shell.nix | ||
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 the evaluator
If you are in a full checkout of the TVL depot, you can simply run mg build in this directory (or mg build //tvix/eval from anywhere in
the repo). The mg command is found in /tools/magrathea.
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.
The evaluator 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.