This is no longer used by the compiler itself, and removing this support opens
the door to massively simplifying the Decodable/Decoder API by dropping the
self-describing deserialization support (necessary for JSON).
`Decoder` has two impls:
- opaque: this impl is already partly infallible, i.e. in some places it
currently panics on failure (e.g. if the input is too short, or on a
bad `Result` discriminant), and in some places it returns an error
(e.g. on a bad `Option` discriminant). The number of places where
either happens is surprisingly small, just because the binary
representation has very little redundancy and a lot of input reading
can occur even on malformed data.
- json: this impl is fully fallible, but it's only used (a) for the
`.rlink` file production, and there's a `FIXME` comment suggesting it
should change to a binary format, and (b) in a few tests in
non-fundamental ways. Indeed #85993 is open to remove it entirely.
And the top-level places in the compiler that call into decoding just
abort on error anyway. So the fallibility is providing little value, and
getting rid of it leads to some non-trivial performance improvements.
Much of this commit is pretty boring and mechanical. Some notes about
a few interesting parts:
- The commit removes `Decoder::{Error,error}`.
- `InternIteratorElement::intern_with`: the impl for `T` now has the same
optimization for small counts that the impl for `Result<T, E>` has,
because it's now much hotter.
- Decodable impls for SmallVec, LinkedList, VecDeque now all use
`collect`, which is nice; the one for `Vec` uses unsafe code, because
that gave better perf on some benchmarks.
The signed LEB128 decoding function used a hardcoded constant of 64
instead of the number of bits in the type of integer being decoded,
which resulted in incorrect results for some inputs. Fix this, make the
decoding more consistent with the unsigned version, and increase the
LEB128 encoding and decoding test coverage.
Reduce a large memory spike that happens during serialization by writing
the incr comp structures to file by way of a fixed-size buffer, rather
than an unbounded vector.
Effort was made to keep the instruction count close to that of the
previous implementation. However, buffered writing to a file inherently
has more overhead than writing to a vector, because each write may
result in a handleable error. To reduce this overhead, arrangements are
made so that each LEB128-encoded integer can be written to the buffer
with only one capacity and error check. Higher-level optimizations in
which entire composite structures can be written with one capacity and
error check are possible, but would require much more work.
The performance is mostly on par with the previous implementation, with
small to moderate instruction count regressions. The memory reduction is
significant, however, so it seems like a worth-while trade-off.
