This has been a long time coming. Conditions in rust were initially envisioned
as being a good alternative to error code return pattern. The idea is that all
errors are fatal-by-default, and you can opt-in to handling the error by
registering an error handler.
While sounding nice, conditions ended up having some unforseen shortcomings:
* Actually handling an error has some very awkward syntax:
let mut result = None;
let mut answer = None;
io::io_error::cond.trap(|e| { result = Some(e) }).inside(|| {
answer = Some(some_io_operation());
});
match result {
Some(err) => { /* hit an I/O error */ }
None => {
let answer = answer.unwrap();
/* deal with the result of I/O */
}
}
This pattern can certainly use functions like io::result, but at its core
actually handling conditions is fairly difficult
* The "zero value" of a function is often confusing. One of the main ideas
behind using conditions was to change the signature of I/O functions. Instead
of read_be_u32() returning a result, it returned a u32. Errors were notified
via a condition, and if you caught the condition you understood that the "zero
value" returned is actually a garbage value. These zero values are often
difficult to understand, however.
One case of this is the read_bytes() function. The function takes an integer
length of the amount of bytes to read, and returns an array of that size. The
array may actually be shorter, however, if an error occurred.
Another case is fs::stat(). The theoretical "zero value" is a blank stat
struct, but it's a little awkward to create and return a zero'd out stat
struct on a call to stat().
In general, the return value of functions that can raise error are much more
natural when using a Result as opposed to an always-usable zero-value.
* Conditions impose a necessary runtime requirement on *all* I/O. In theory I/O
is as simple as calling read() and write(), but using conditions imposed the
restriction that a rust local task was required if you wanted to catch errors
with I/O. While certainly an surmountable difficulty, this was always a bit of
a thorn in the side of conditions.
* Functions raising conditions are not always clear that they are raising
conditions. This suffers a similar problem to exceptions where you don't
actually know whether a function raises a condition or not. The documentation
likely explains, but if someone retroactively adds a condition to a function
there's nothing forcing upstream users to acknowledge a new point of task
failure.
* Libaries using I/O are not guaranteed to correctly raise on conditions when an
error occurs. In developing various I/O libraries, it's much easier to just
return `None` from a read rather than raising an error. The silent contract of
"don't raise on EOF" was a little difficult to understand and threw a wrench
into the answer of the question "when do I raise a condition?"
Many of these difficulties can be overcome through documentation, examples, and
general practice. In the end, all of these difficulties added together ended up
being too overwhelming and improving various aspects didn't end up helping that
much.
A result-based I/O error handling strategy also has shortcomings, but the
cognitive burden is much smaller. The tooling necessary to make this strategy as
usable as conditions were is much smaller than the tooling necessary for
conditions.
Perhaps conditions may manifest themselves as a future entity, but for now
we're going to remove them from the standard library.
Closes#9795Closes#8968
* All I/O now returns IoResult<T> = Result<T, IoError>
* All formatting traits now return fmt::Result = IoResult<()>
* The if_ok!() macro was added to libstd
This ends up saving a single `call` instruction in the optimised code,
but saves a few hundred lines of non-optimised IR for `fn main() {
fail!("foo {}", "bar"); }` (comparing against the minimal generic
baseline from the parent commit).
They all have to go into a single module at the moment unfortunately.
Ideally, the logging macros would live in std::logging, condition! would
live in std::condition, format! in std::fmt, etc. However, this
introduces cyclic dependencies between those modules and the macros they
use which the current expansion system can't deal with. We may be able
to get around this by changing the expansion phase to a two-pass system
but that's for a later PR.
Closes#2247
cc #11763
This implements a number of the baby steps needed to start eliminating everything inside of `std::io`. It turns out that there are a *lot* of users of that module, so I'm going to try to tackle them separately instead of bringing down the whole system all at once.
This pull implements a large amount of unimplemented functionality inside of `std::rt::io` including:
* Native file I/O (file descriptors, *FILE)
* Native stdio (through the native file descriptors)
* Native processes (extracted from `std::run`)
I also found that there are a number of users of `std::io` which desire to read an input line-by-line, so I added an implementation of `read_until` and `read_line` to `BufferedReader`.
With all of these changes in place, I started to axe various usages of `std::io`. There's a lot of one-off uses here-and-there, but the major use-case remaining that doesn't have a fantastic solution is `extra::json`. I ran into a few compiler bugs when attempting to remove that, so I figured I'd come back to it later instead.
There is one fairly major change in this pull, and it's moving from native stdio to uv stdio via `print` and `println`. Unfortunately logging still goes through native I/O (via `dumb_println`). This is going to need some thinking, because I still want the goal of logging/printing to be 0 allocations, and this is not possible if `io::stdio::stderr()` is called on each log message. Instead I think that this may need to be cached as the `logger` field inside the `Task` struct, but that will require a little more workings to get right (this is also a similar problem for print/println, do we cache `stdout()` to not have to re-create it every time?).
This changes an `assert_once_ever!` assertion to just a plain old assertion
around an atomic boolean to ensure that one particular runtime doesn't attempt
to exit twice.
Closes#9739
This large commit implements and `html` output option for rustdoc_ng. The
executable has been altered to be invoked as "rustdoc_ng html <crate>" and
it will dump everything into the local "doc" directory. JSON can still be
generated by changing 'html' to 'json'.
This also fixes a number of bugs in rustdoc_ng relating to comment stripping,
along with some other various issues that I found along the way.
The `make doc` command has been altered to generate the new documentation into
the `doc/ng/$(CRATE)` directories.
Naturally, and sadly, turning off sanity checks in the runtime is
a noticable performance win. The particular test I'm running goes from
~1.5 s to ~1.3s.
Sanity checks are turned *on* when not optimizing, or when cfg
includes `rtdebug` or `rtassert`.
It now actually does logging, and is compiled out when `--cfg rtdebug` is not
given to the libstd build, which it isn't by default. This makes the rt
benchmarks 18-50% faster.
old design the TLS held the scheduler struct, and the scheduler struct
held the active task. This posed all sorts of weird problems due to
how we wanted to use the contents of TLS. The cleaner approach is to
leave the active task in TLS and have the task hold the scheduler. To
make this work out the scheduler has to run inside a regular task, and
then once that is the case the context switching code is massively
simplified, as instead of three possible paths there is only one. The
logical flow is also easier to follow, as the scheduler struct acts
somewhat like a "token" indicating what is active.
These changes also necessitated changing a large number of runtime
tests, and rewriting most of the runtime testing helpers.
Polish level is "low", as I will very soon start on more scheduler
changes that will require wiping the polish off. That being said there
should be sufficient comments around anything complex to make this
entirely respectable as a standalone commit.
