tvl-depot/tvix
Vincent Ambo d6c57eb957 refactor(tvix/eval): ensure VM operations fit in a single byte
This replaces the OpCode enum with a new Op enum which is guaranteed to fit in a
single byte. Instead of carrying enum variants with data, every variant that has
runtime data encodes it into the `Vec<u8>` that a `Chunk` now carries.

This has several advantages:

* Less stack space is required at runtime, and fewer allocations are required
  while compiling.
* The OpCode doesn't need to carry "weird" special-cased data variants anymore.
* It is faster (albeit, not by much). On my laptop, results consistently look
  approximately like this:

  Benchmark 1: ./before -E '(import <nixpkgs> {}).firefox.outPath' --log-level ERROR --no-warnings
  Time (mean ± σ):      8.224 s ±  0.272 s    [User: 7.149 s, System: 0.688 s]
  Range (min … max):    7.759 s …  8.583 s    10 runs

  Benchmark 2: ./after -E '(import <nixpkgs> {}).firefox.outPath' --log-level ERROR --no-warnings
  Time (mean ± σ):      8.000 s ±  0.198 s    [User: 7.036 s, System: 0.633 s]
  Range (min … max):    7.718 s …  8.334 s    10 runs

  See notes below for why the performance impact might be less than expected.
* It is faster while at the same time dropping some optimisations we previously
  performed.

This has several disadvantages:

* The code is closer to how one would write it in C or Go.
* Bit shifting!
* There is (for now) slightly more code than before.

On performance I have the following thoughts at the moment:

In order to prepare for adding GC, there's a couple of places in Tvix where I'd
like to fence off certain kinds of complexity (such as mutating bytecode, which,
for various reaons, also has to be part of data that is subject to GC). With
this change, we can drop optimisations like retroactively modifying existing
bytecode and *still* achieve better performance than before.

I believe that this is currently worth it to pave the way for changes that are
more significant for performance.

In general this also opens other avenues of optimisation: For example, we can
profile which argument sizes actually exist and remove the copy overhead of
varint decoding (which does show up in profiles) by using more adequately sized
types for, e.g., constant indices.

Known regressions:

* Op::Constant is no longer printing its values in disassembly (this can be
  fixed, I just didn't get around to it, will do separately).

Change-Id: Id9b3a4254623a45de03069dbdb70b8349e976743
Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/12191
Tested-by: BuildkiteCI
Reviewed-by: flokli <flokli@flokli.de>
2024-08-19 11:02:50 +00:00
..
.vscode chore(tvix): fix vscode rust-analyzer recommendation 2022-10-15 16:54:28 +00:00
boot fix(tvix/boot): workaround test flakiness 2024-08-17 20:36:05 +00:00
build refactor(tvix/castore): add PathComponent type for checked components 2024-08-17 15:59:10 +00:00
build-go docs(tvix/build/protos): clarify content-addressing 2024-08-16 16:03:08 +00:00
castore refactor(tvix/castore): have SymlinkTarget-specific errors 2024-08-18 17:22:21 +00:00
castore-go chore(3p/sources): Bump channels & overlays (2024-07-28) 2024-08-01 10:06:33 +00:00
cli feat(tvix/cli): Extend nixpkgs eval test to include NixOS installer 2024-08-16 20:59:51 +00:00
docs docs(tvix/TODO): castore Directory struct is done 2024-08-13 18:52:25 +00:00
eval refactor(tvix/eval): ensure VM operations fit in a single byte 2024-08-19 11:02:50 +00:00
glue docs(tvix/glue/tvix_io): update doc-comments 2024-08-19 10:24:37 +00:00
nar-bridge refactor(tvix/castore): add PathComponent type for checked components 2024-08-17 15:59:10 +00:00
nix-compat chore(tvix): Retain original passthru in Rust builds 2024-08-15 23:37:00 +00:00
nix-lang-test-suite docs(tvix): initial notes on a possible generic Nix lang test suite 2024-01-22 14:21:19 +00:00
scripts chore(tvix): Run criterion benchmarks for the whole workspace 2023-12-20 18:04:43 +00:00
serde refactor(tvix): use composition & registry for from_addr 2024-07-18 19:19:26 +00:00
store refactor(tvix/castore): add PathComponent type for checked components 2024-08-17 15:59:10 +00:00
store-go chore(3p/sources): Bump channels & overlays (2024-07-28) 2024-08-01 10:06:33 +00:00
tools chore(tvix/tools/crunch-v2): bump curve25519-dalek 2024-08-16 06:52:15 +00:00
tracing chore(tvix): Retain original passthru in Rust builds 2024-08-15 23:37:00 +00:00
verify-lang-tests chore(tvix/verify-lang-tests): update latest Nix version 2024-08-14 15:01:03 +00:00
website chore(tvix/nar-bridge): move to nar-bridge-go 2024-05-15 21:31:36 +00:00
.gitignore chore(tvix): add /*.sled to .gitignore 2023-09-24 17:05:48 +00:00
buildkite.yml feat(tvix/buildkite): apply a 10 minutes timeout 2024-04-13 11:44:37 +00:00
Cargo.lock refactor(tvix/eval): ensure VM operations fit in a single byte 2024-08-19 11:02:50 +00:00
Cargo.nix refactor(tvix/eval): ensure VM operations fit in a single byte 2024-08-19 11:02:50 +00:00
Cargo.toml feat(tvix/nar-bridge): init 2024-07-20 16:53:23 +00:00
clippy.toml refactor(tvix/castore): add PathComponent type for checked components 2024-08-17 15:59:10 +00:00
crate-hashes.json chore(tvix/tracing): switch tracing-opentelemetry from git to release 2024-07-22 13:36:08 +00:00
default.nix fix(tvix/crate2nix-check): Revert use of depotfmt.check wrapper 2024-08-04 13:47:31 +00:00
LICENSE chore(tvix): Bootstrap Tvix folder 2021-03-27 00:09:49 +00:00
logo.webp refactor(tvix): move logo to //tvix:logo 2023-09-10 13:13:14 +00:00
OWNERS chore(depot): update OWNERS files for aspen 2023-12-20 18:35:58 +00:00
README.md chore(tvix): drop nar-bridge-go 2024-07-30 14:36:31 +00:00
shell.nix refactor(tvix/store): drop FUSE multithread workaround for Darwin 2024-06-16 12:02:11 +00:00
utils.nix fix(tvix/nar-bridge): filter src in utils.nix 2024-07-30 14:26:58 +00:00


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 in our dedicated IRC channel, #tvix-dev on hackint, which is also reachable via XMPP at #tvix-dev@irc.hackint.org (sic!) and via Matrix at #tvix-dev:hackint.org.

There's also the IRC channel of the wider TVL community, less on-topic, or 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/castore - subtree storage/transfer in a content-addressed fashion
  • //tvix/cli - preliminary REPL & CLI implementation for Tvix
  • //tvix/eval - an implementation of the Nix programming language
  • //tvix/nar-bridge - a HTTP webserver providing a Nix HTTP Binary Cache interface in front of a tvix-store
  • //tvix/nix-compat - a Rust library for compatibility with C++ Nix, features like encodings and hashing schemes and formats
  • //tvix/serde - a Rust library for using the Nix language for app configuration
  • //tvix/store - a "filesystem" linking Nix store paths and metadata with the content-addressed layer

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 tvix workspace only (git clone https://code.tvl.fyi/depot.git:workspace=views/tvix.git), nix-shell provides 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 //tools:crate2nix-generate in //tvix itself and commit the changes to the generated Cargo.nix file. This only applies to the full TVL checkout.

When adding/removing a Cargo feature for a crate, you will want to add it to the features power set that gets tested in CI. For each crate there's a default.nix with a mkFeaturePowerset invocation, modify the list to include/remove the feature. Note that you don't want to add "collection" features, such as fs for tvix-[ca]store or default.

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.