Saturday, December 27, 2014

My thoughts on Rust in 2015

Disclaimer: these are my personal thoughts on where I would like to see Rust go in 2015 and what I would like to work on. They are not official policy from the Rust team or anything like that.

The obvious big thing coming up in 2015 is the 1.0 release. All my energy will be pretty much devoted to that in the first quarter. From the compiler's point of view, we are in pretty good shape for the release. I'll be mainly working on associated types (with Niko) - trying to make them as feature complete and as bug free as possible. This is primarily motivated by the standard library; we want to provide everything the standard library needs here. Other things on my work list are a number of syntactic changes (`?Sized`, slicing (this is not purely syntactic), other minor changes as they come up) and coercions (here, there are a few backwards incompatible things, and providing a really solid, ergonomic story around coercions is important). Any other time is likely to be spent on 'polish' things such as improving error messages and refactoring the compiler in minor ways; possibly even some hacking on the libraries if that would be most useful.

We (the Rust community) also need to do some planning for post-1.0 Rust. There are obviously a lot of features people would like post-1.0 and it would be chaos to try to implement them all asap. So, we need to decide what is in scope for the immediate future of Rust. My personal preference is to focus on stability for a while and only add a minimum of new language features. Stability for me means building better, broader libraries, supporting the ecosystem (work on Cargo and crates.io, for example), fixing bugs, and making the compiler friendlier to work with - both for regular users (error messages, build times, etc.) and for tooling.

'A minimum of language features' will probably mean quite a few new things actually, since we postponed a lot of work due to 1.0 which are pretty high priority. UFCS, custom DST coercions, cross-borrowing coercions, and being able to return a bare trait from a function are high on my wish list. There are a couple of large features which seem debatable for immediate work - higher kinded types and efficient inheritance. Ideally, we would put both of these off, but the former is in great demand for improving the standard libraries and the latter would really help work on Servo (and also improve the compiler in many ways, depending on the chosen solution). Both of these need a lot of design work as well as being big implementation jobs.

Finally, the biggest piece of Rust making me uncomfortable right now is macros. We will have limited macro support for 1.0. I would like to start looking at macro rules 2.0 and a better system for syntax extensions as soon as possible. The longer we leave this, the more people will use and get used to the existing solution or start using external tools to replace syntax extensions.

My vision for macro rules, is basically a tweaked version of today's. Fundamentally, I think hygiene needs to be built into everything from the ground up, including more sophisticated 'type' annotations on macro arguments. Unfortunately, I think this means a lot of work, including rewriting the compiler's name resolution machinery (but then we want to do that anyway).

Syntax extensions/procedural macros have many more open questions. I'm not sure how to make these hygienic and not too painful to write. There is also the question of the interface we make available. Using the compiler's AST and giving extensions access to the entire compiler is pretty awful. There are a number of alternatives: my preference is to separate libsyntax's AST from the compiler's and make the former available as an interface, along with a library of convenience functions. Other alternatives are using source text or token trees as input and output, or relying much more heavily on quasi-quoting.

Looking further ahead, I don't have too many big language features I'm wanting to push forward (efficient inheritance and nested enums/refinement types, being the exception; perhaps parameterised modules at some point). There are a bunch of smaller ones I'm keen on though (type ascription, explicit lifetimes in the syntax, parameterising with ints to make fixed length arrays more usable (which is related to CTFE), etc.), but they are mostly low priority.

I am keen, however, on pushing forward on making the compiler a better piece of software and on improving support for tooling. I think these are two sides of the same coin really. Some ideas I have, in rough order of importance/priority/ease of implementation:

  • fix parallel codegen. This is currently broken with what I suspect is a minor bug. There is another bug preventing having it turned on by default. Given that this halves build times of the compiler for me, I am keen to get it fixed.
  • Land incremental codegen. Stuart Pernsteiner came super-close to finishing this. It should be relatively easy to finish it and land it. It should then have a massive effect on compilation performance.
  • Improve the output of save-analysis to be more useful and general purpose. I hope this can become an API of sorts for many compiler-based tools, especially in the medium term, before we are ready to expose a better and more permenant API.
  • Separate the libsyntax and compiler ASTs. This is primarily in support of the macro changes described above, but I think it is important for allowing long term evolution of the compiler too.
  • Refactor name resolution. Again important for macro reform, but also it is a confusing and buggy part of the compiler.
  • Make the CFG the first class data structure for all stages from borrow checking onwards.
  • Refactor trans to use its own IR, i.e., make it a series of lowering steps: CFG -> IR -> LLVM. This should hopefully make trans easier to understand and extend, and allow for adding our own optimisation passes.
  • Refactor metadata. This is a really ugly part of the compiler. We could make much better use of metadata for tools (there is a lot of overlap with save-analysis output and debuginfo, and it is used by RustDoc), but it is really hard to use at the moment. It is also crucial to have good metadata support for incremental compilation. I hope metadata can become just a straightforward serialisation of some compiler IR, this may mean we need another IR between the compiler's AST and the CFG.
  • Incremental compilation. This is a huge job of work, but really necessary for a lot of tools and would go along way to solving our compile time problems. It is very dependent on a better compiler architecture.

I guess that not all of this will get done in 2015, but I can dream...

Side projects


Some things I want to work on in my spare time (and possibly a little bit of Mozilla time, if it is prioritised right): get DXR up and going. Frustratingly, this was working back in June or July, but then DXR underwent a massive refactoring and I had to port across the Rust plugin. That has dragged on because I have been low on both time and motivation. But it is such a useful tool that I am keen to get this working, and it is getting close now. Once it is 'done' there are always ways to make it better (for example, my latest addition is showing everything imported by a glob import).

Syntax extensions on methods. I hacked this up on the plane to Portland last month, but fixing the details has taken a long while. I think it is ready now, but I need to implement something that uses it to make sure that the design is right. This project meant changing a few things with syntax extensions, and I hope to deprecate and remove some of the older, less flexible versions. Plus, there are some other follow up things.

The motivation for syntax extensions on methods is libhoare. I want to be able to put pre- and postconditions on methods. I have this working in some cases, but there is a lot of duplicate code and I think I can do better. Perhaps not though. Perhaps it can also inform some of the design around libraries for syntax extensions.

A while back I thought of adding `scanln`, a compliment to `println` using the same infrastructure, but for easy input rather easy output. I ended up forgetting about this because the RFC for adding it was rejected due to no out-of-tree implementation, but my implementation required big changes to the existing `format!` support. I would like to resurrect this project, since lack of really easy input is the number one thing which puts me off using Rust for a lot of small tasks. I believe it also raises the bar for Rust being taught at universities, etc.

I have some crazy ideas around a tool that would be a hybrid of grep/sed-with-knowledge-of-syntax-and-types, refactoring tools, and a Rustfix/Rustfmt kind of thing. It seems I need this kind of thing a lot - I spend a lot of time on tasks which are marginally more complicated than sed can handle, but much easier than needing a full refactoring tool.

6 comments:

Cyberax said...

As someone who has to work with heavily-macrossed code on Scala I can only ask this: "Please, remove macros support from Rust"

Really. Just pull them. Perhaps, leave them at the level of constexprs in C++.

Macro systems make it way too easy to write incomprehensible code and as an additional bonus, they make it impossible to write 100% correct IDE language support.

PS: please, also don't add HKTs.

Nick Cameron. said...

@Cyberax, I used to agree with this position. But I think macros have been around too long and are too useful to now remove. I also realise that if you don't have macros, people will just use preprocessors or codegen tools - I'd rather have that in the language than not. The challenge is to make macros as sane as possible so that you can't do too many horrible things and they work well with tools.

My number one goal for 'new' macros is to make sure they work well with tools such as IDEs. I believe it can be done!

As for HKTs, I have also been in the 'against' camp, but please note that there is little support amongst core contributors for full Haskell or Scala style HKTs. Instead, we are looking at some kind of simplified mechanism that can handle some of the common and painful weakness in out type system (e.g., write a function which works equally well with a &T, Box or Rc)

Cyberax said...

I think you can do passable IDE support if you stick to quasiquoting only. There's a precedent - Nemerle ( http://nemerle.org/About ) support in VisualStudio and its further development as Nitra ( https://github.com/JetBrains/Nitra ).

That won't be enough to support rich code generation functionality required for the likes of current regex macros, but I think that external tools in such cases are entirely appropriate. They at least make you stop and think if it's actually worth the pain to use them.

I'm in a wait-and-see mode regarding HKTs, but so far the examples I've seen don't inspire confidence.

PPS: checked exceptions would actually be awesome.

battlemechanik said...

HKT and macros (preferably quasiquote) are must-have features.

Checked exceptions are a horrible idea and destroy the usability of closures.

Anonymous said...

Rust is already becoming 'too complicated'.

Please try to remove features, or hide features by accepting simpler syntactic sugar as much as possible.

Adding more to Rust is a terrible idea.

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