Category Archives: Programming

2018/12/31
11 Comments
Programming

Comparing Pythagorean triples in C++, D, and Rust

EDIT: As pointed out in the Rust reddit thread, the Rust version can be modified to run faster due to a suble difference between ..=z and ..(z+1). I’ve updated the measurements with rustc0 being the former and rustc1 being the latter. I’ve also had to change some of the conclusions.

You may have recently encountered and/or read this blog post criticising a possible C++20 implementation of Pythagorean triples using ranges. In it the author benchmarks different implemetations of the problem, comparing readability, compile times, run times and binary sizes. My main language these days is D, and given that D also has ranges (and right now, as opposed to a future version of the language), I almost immediately reached for my keyboard. By that time there were already some D and Rust versions floating about as a result of the reddit thread, so fortunately for lazy me “all” I had to next was to benchmark the lot of them. All the code for what I’m about to talk about can be found on github.

As fancy/readable/extensible as ranges/coroutines/etc. may be, let’s get a baseline by comparing the simplest possible implementation using for loops and printf. I copied the “simplest.cpp” example from the blog post then translated it to D and Rust. To make sure I didn’t make any mistakes in the manual translation, I compared the output to the canonical C++ implementation (output.txt in the github repo). It’s easy to run fast if the output is wrong, after all. For those not familiar with D, dmd is the reference compiler (compiles fast, generates sub-optimal code compared to modern backends) while ldc is the LLVM based D compiler (same frontend, uses LLVM for the backend). Using ldc also makes for a more fair comparison with clang and rustc due to all three using the same backend (albeit possibly different versions of it).

All times reported will be in milliseconds as reported by running commands with time on my Arch Linux Dell XPS15. Compile times were measured by excluding the linker, the commands being clang++ -c src.cpp, dmd -c src.d, ldc -c src.d, rustc --emit=obj src.rs for each compiler (obviously for unoptimised builds). The original number of iterations was 100, but the runtimes were so short as to be practically useless for comparisons, so I increased that to 1000. The times presented are a result of running each command 10 times and taking the mininum, except for the clang unoptmised build of C++ ranges because, as a wise lady on the internet once said, ain’t nobody got time for that (you’ll see why soon). Optimised builds were done with -O2 for clang and ldc,  -O -inline for dmd and -C opt-level=2 for rustc. The compiler versions were clang 7.0.1, dmd 2.083.1, ldc 1.13.0 and rustc 1.31.1. The results for the simple, readable, non-extensible version of the problem (simple.cpp, simple.d, simple.rs in the repo):

Simple          CT (ms)  RT (ms)

clang debug      59       599
clang release    69       154
dmd debug        11       369
dmd release      11       153
ldc debug        31       599
ldc release      38       153
rustc0 debug    100      8445
rustc0 release  103       349
rustc1 debug             6650
rustc1 release            217

C++ run times are the same as D when optimised, with compile times being a lot shorter for D. Rust stands out here for both being extremely slow without optimisations, compiling even slower than C++, and generating code that takes around 50% longer to run even with optimisations turned on! I didn’t expect that at all.

The simple implementation couples the generation of the triples with what’s meant to be done with them. One option not discussed in the original blog to solve that is to pass in a lambda or other callable to the code instead of hardcoding the printf. To me this is the simplest way to solve this, but according to one redditor there are composability issues that may arise. This might or might not be important depending on the application though. One can also compose functions in a pipeline and pass that in, so I’m not sure what the problem is. In any case, I wrote 3 implementations and timed them (lambda.cpp, lambda.d, lambda.rs):

Lambda          CT (ms)  RT (ms)

clang debug      188       597
clang release    203       154
dmd debug         33       368
dmd release       37       154
ldc debug         59       580
ldc release       79       154
rustc0 debug     111      9252
rustc0 release   134       352
rustc1 debug              6811
rustc1 release             154

The first thing to notice is, except for Rust (which was slow anyway), compile times have risen by about a factor of 3: there’s a cost to being generic. Run times seem unaffected except that the unoptimised Rust build got slightly slower. I’m glad that my intuition seems to have been right on how to extend the original example: keep the for loops, pass a lambda, profit. Sure, the compile-times went up but in the context of a larger project this probably wouldn’t matter that much. Even for C++, 200ms is… ok. Performance-wise, it’s now a 3-way tie between the languages, and no runtime penalty compared to the non-generic version. Nice!

Next up, the code that motivated all of this: ranges. I didn’t write any of it: the D version was from this forum post, the C++ code is in the blog (using the “available now” ranges v3 library), and the Rust code was on reddit. Results:

Range           CT (ms)   RT (ms)

clang debug     4198     126230
clang release   4436        294
dmd debug         90      12734
dmd release      106       7755
ldc debug        158      15579
ldc release      324       1045
rustc0 debug     128      11018
rustc0 release   180        422
rustc1 debug               8469
rustc1 release              168

I have to hand it to rustc – whatever you throw at it the compile times seem to be flat. After modifying the code as mentioned in the edit at the beginning, it’s now the fastest out of the 3!

dmd compile times are still very fast, but the generated code isn’t. ldc does better at optimising, but the runtimes are pretty bad for both of them. I wonder what changes would have to be made to the frontend to generate the same code as for loops.

C++? I only ran the debug version once. I’m just not going to wait for that long, and besides, whatever systematic errors are in the measurement process don’t really matter when it takes over 2 minutes. Compile times are abysmal, the only solace being that optimising the code only takes 5% longer time than to not bother at all.

In my opinion, none of the versions are readable. Rust at least manages to be nearly as fast as the previous two versions, with C++ taking twice as long as it used to for the same task. D didn’t fare well at all where performance is concerned. It’s possible to get the ldc optimised version down to ~700ms by eliminating bounds checking, but even then it wouldn’t seem to be worth the bother.

My conclusion? Don’t bother with the range versions. Just… don’t. Nigh unreadable code that compiles and runs slowly.

Finally, I tried the D generator version on reddit. There’s a Rust version on Hacker News as well, but it involves using rust nightly and enabling features, and I can’t be bothered figuring out how to do any of that. If any Rustacean wants to submit something that works with a build script, please open a PR on the repo.

Generator      CT (ms)  RT (ms)

dmd debug      208      381
dmd release    222      220
ldc debug      261      603
ldc release    335      224

Compile times aren’t great (the worst so far for D), but the runtimes are quite acceptable. I had a sneaky suspicion that the runtimes here are slower due to startup code for std.concurrency so I increased N to 5000 and compared this version to the simplest possible one at the top of this post:

N=5k                    RT (ms)
dmd relase simple       8819
dmd release generator   8875

As expected, the difference vanished.

Final conclusions: for me,  passing a lambda is the way to go, or generators if you have them (C++ doesn’t have coroutines yet and the Rust version mentioned above needs features that are apparently only available in the nightly builds). I like ranges in both their C++ and D incarnations, but sometimes they just aren’t worth it. Lambdas/generators FTW!

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2018/12/11
4 Comments
Programming

Improvements I’d like to see in D

D, as any language that stands on the shoulder of giants, was conceived to not repeat the errors of the past, and I think it’s done an admirable job at that. However, and perfectly predictably, it made a few of its own. Sometimes, similar to the ones it avoided! In my opinion, some of them are:

No UFCS chain for templates.

UFCS is a great feature and was under discussion to be added to C++, but as of the C++17 standard it hasn’t yet. It’s syntatic sugar for treating a free function as a member function if the first parameter is of that type, i.e. allows one to write obj.func(3) instead of func(obj, 3). Why is that important? Algorithm chains. Consider:

range.map!fun.filter!gun.join

Instead of:

join(filter!gun(map!fun(range)));

It’s much more readable and flows more naturally. This is clearly a win, and yet I’m talking about it in a blog post about D’s mistakes. Why? Because templates have no such thing. There are compile-time “type-level” versions of both map and filter in D’s standard library called staticMap and Filter (the names could be more consistent). But they don’t chain:

alias memberNames = AliasSeq!(__traits(allMembers, T));
alias Member(string name) = Alias!(__traits(getMember, T, name));
alias members = staticMap!(Member, memberNames);
alias memberFunctions = Filter!(isSomeFunction, members);

One has to name all of these intermediate steps even though none of them deserve to be named, just to avoid writing a russian doll parenthesis unreadable nightmare. Imagine if instead it were:

alias memberFunctions = __traits(allMembers, T)
    .staticMap!Member
    .Filter!(isSomeFunction);

One can dream. Which leads me to:

No template lambdas.

In the hypothetical template UFCS chain above, I wrote staticMap!Member, where the Member definition is as in the example before it. However: why do I need to name it either? In “regular” code we can use lambdas to avoid naming functions. Why can’t I do the same thing for templates?

alias memberFunctions = __traits(allMembers, T)
    .staticMap!(name => Alias!(__traits(getMember, T, name)))
    .Filter!isSomeFunction

Eponymous templates

Bear with me: I think the idea behind eponymous templates is great, is just that the execution isn’t, and I’ll explain why by comparing it to something D got right: constructors and destructors. In C++ and Java, these special member functions take the name of the class, which makes refactoring quite a bit annoying. D did away with that by naming them this and ~this, which makes the class name irrelevant. The way to do eponymous templates right is to (obviously renaming the feature) follow D’s own lead here and use either this or This to refer to itself. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve introduced a bug due to template renaming that was hard to find.

@property getters

What are these for given the optional parentheses for functions with no parameters?

inout

Template this can accomplish the same thing and is more useful anyway.

Returning a reference

It’s practically pointless. Variables can’t be ref, so assigning it to a function that returns ref copies the value (which is probably not what the user expected), so one might as well return a pointer. The exception would be UFCS chains, but before DIP1016 is accepted and implemented, that doesn’t work either.

Wrong defaults

I think there’s a general consensus that @safe, pure and immutable should be default. Which leads me to:

Attribute soup

I’ve lost count now of how many times I’ve had to write @safe @nogc pure nothrow const scope return. Really.

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2018/11/20
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Programming

Unit Testing? Do As I Say, Don’t Do As I Do

I’m a firm believer in unit testing. I’ve done more tech talks on the subject than I’d care to count, and always tell audiences the same thing: prefer unit tests, here’s a picture of the testing pyramid, keep unit tests pure (no side-effects), avoid end-to-end tests (they’re flaky, people will stop paying attention to red builds since all builds will be red). I tell them about adapters, ports and hexagonal architecture. But when it comes to using libclang to parse and translate C and C++ headers, I end up punting and writing a lot of integration tests instead. Hmm.

I know why people write tests with side-effects, and why they end up writing integration and end-to-end ones instead of the nice pure unit test happy place I advocate. It’s easier. There’s less thinking involved. A lot less. However, taking the easy path has always come back to bite me. Those kinds of tests take longer. They higher up the test pyramid you go, the flakier they get. TCP ports stay open longer than a tester would like, for instance. The network goes down. All sorts of things.

I understand why I wrote integration tests instead of unit tests when interfacing with libclang too. Like it is for everyone else, it was just easier. I failed to come up with a plan to unit test what I was doing. It didn’t help that I’d never used libclang and had no idea what the API looked like or what it allowed me to do. It also doesn’t help that libclang doesn’t have an option to take a string to the code to parse and instead takes a file name, but I can work around that.

Because of this, the dpp codebase currently suffers from that lack of separation of concerns. Code that translates C/C++ to D is now intimately tied to libclang and its quirks. If I ever try to use something other than libclang, I won’t be able to. All of the bad things I caution everybody else about? I guaranteed they happened in one of my newest projects.

Before the code collapses under its own complexity, I’ve decided to do what I should’ve done all along and am rewriting dpp so it uses layers to get away from the libclang mess. I’m still figuring it all out, but the main idea is to have a transformation layer between libclang and my code that takes its data types and converts them to a new set of AST types that are my own. From then on it should be trivial to unit test the translation of those AST types that represent C or C++ code into D. Funnily enough, the fact that I wrote so many integration tests will keep me honest since all of those old tests will still have to pass. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I might do another blog post covering how I ended up porting a codebase with pretty much only integration tests to the unit variety. It might be of interest to anyone maintaining a legacy codebase (i.e. all of us).

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2018/11/13
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Programming

libclang: not as great as I thought

I’ve been hearing about the delights of libclang for a while now. A compiler as a library, what a thought! Never-get-it-wrong again parsing/completion/whathaveyou! Amazing.

Then I tried using it.

If you’re parsing C (and maybe Objective C, but I wouldn’t know), then it’s great. It does what it says on the tin and then some, and all the information is at your fingertips. C++? Not so much.

libclang is the C API of the clang frontend. The “real” code is written in C++, but it’s unstable in the sense that there’s no API guarantees. The C API however is stable. It’s also the only option if you want to use the compiler as a library from a different language.

As I’ve found out, the only C++ entities that are exposed by libclang are the ones that the authors have needed, which leaves a lot to be desired. Do you want to get a list of a struct’s template parameters? You can get the number of them, and you can get a type template argument at a particular index after that. That sounds great, until you realise that some template arguments are values, and you can’t get those. At all. You can’t even tell if they’re values or not. I had to come up with a heuristic where I’d call clang_Type_getTemplateArgumentAsType and then use the type kind to determine if it’s a value or not (`CXType_Invalid` means a value, `CXType_Unexposed` means a non-specialised type argument and anything else is a specialised template type argument. Obviously.). Extracting the value? That involves going through the tokens of the struct and finding the ith token in the angle brackets. Sigh.

And this is because it’s a templated struct/class. Template functions don’t need any of this and are better supported because reasons.

Then there are bugs. Enum constants in template structs show up as 0 for no reason at all, and template argument naming is inconsistent:

template <typename> struct Struct;
template <typename T> struct Struct {
    Struct(const Struct& other) {}
};

See that copy constructor above? Its only parameter is, technically, of const Struct<T>& type. So you’d think libclang would tell you that the type’s spelling is T, but no, it’s type-parameter-0-0. Remove the first line with the struct declaration? Then the type template argument’s spelling is, as a normal person would have guessed, T. If the declaration names the type as `T` it also works as expected. I assume again it’s because reasons.

It’s bad enough that I’m not the only one to have encountered issues. There’s at least one library I know of written to get around libclang’s problems, but I can’t use it for my project because it’s written in C++.

I’m going to eventually have to submit patches to libclang myself, but I have no idea how the approval process over there is like.

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2018/11/06
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Programming

Implementing Rust’s std::sync::Mutex in D

TL;DR? https://github.com/atilaneves/fearless

The first time I encountered a mutex in C++ I was puzzled. It made no sense to me at all that I was locking one to protect some data and the only way to indicate what data was protected by a certain mutex was a naming convention. It seemed to me like a recipe for disaster, and of course, it is.

I’ve hardly written any code in Rust, in fact only one project to learn the basics of the language. But the time I spent with it was enough to marvel at std::sync::Mutex – at last it made sense! Access to the variable has to go through the mutex’s API, and no convention is needed. And, of course, in the Rust tradition said access is safe.

That unsurprisingly made me slightly jealous. In D, shared is a keyword and it protects the programmer from inadvertently accessing shared state in an unsafe manner (mostly). Atomic operations typically take a pointer to a shared T, but larger objects (i.e. user-defined structs) are usually dealt with by locking a mutex, casting away shared and then using the object as thread-local. While this works, it’s tedious, error-prone, and certainly not safe. Since imitation is the highest form of flattery, I decided to shamelessly copy, as much as possible, the idea behind Rust’s Mutex.

Rust makes the API safe via the borrow checker, but D doesn’t have that. It does, however, have the sort-of-still-experimental DIP1000, which is similar in what it tries to achieve. I set out to use the new functionality to try and devise a safe way to avoid the current practice of BYOM (Bring Your Own Mutex).

I started off by reading the concurrency part of The Rust Book, which was very helpful. It even explains implementation details such as the fact that .borrow returns a smart pointer instead of the wrapped type. This too I copied. I then started thinking of ways to use D’s scope to emulate Rust’s borrow checker. The idea wasn’t to have the same semantics but to enable safe usage and fail to compile unsafe code. Pragmatism was key.

I was initially confused about why std::sync::Mutex is nearly always used with std::sync::Arc – it took me writing a bug to realise that shared data is never allocated on the stack. Obvious in retrospect but I somehow failed to realise that. Since Rust doesn’t have a mark-and-sweep GC, the only real option is to use reference counting for the heap-allocated shared data. This realisation led to another: in D there’s a choice between reference counting and simply using GC-allocated memory, so the API reflects that. The RC version is even @nogc!

The API forces the initialisation of the user-defined type to happen by passing parameters to the constructor of that type. This is because passing an extant object isn’t safe – other references to it may exist in the program and data races could occur. Rust can do this and guarantee at compile-time that other mutable references don’t exist, but D can’t, hence the restriction. For types without mutable indirections the restriction is lifted, made possible by D’s world class static reflection capabilities. The API also enforces that the type is shared – there’s no point to using this library if the type isn’t, and even less of a point making the user type `shared T` all the time.

Although D has an actor model message passing library in std.concurrency, none of the functions are @safe. I also realised it would be trivial to write a deadlock by sending the shared data while a mutex is held to another thread. To fix both of these issues, the library I wrote has @safe versions of D’s concurrency primitives, and the send function checks to see if the mutex is locked before actually passing the compound (mutex, T) type (named Exclusive in the library) to another thread of execution.

DIP1000 itself was hard to understand. I ended up reading the proposal several times, and it didn’t help that the current implementation doesn’t match that document 100%. In the end, however, the result seems to work:

https://github.com/atilaneves/fearless

It’s possible that, due to bugs in DIP1000 or in fearless itself that a programmer can break safety, but to the extent of my knowledge this brings @safe concurrent code to D.

I’d love it if any concurrency experts could try and poke holes in the library so I can fix them.

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2018/06/12
10 Comments
Programming

Myths programmers believe

I’m fascinated by misconceptions. I used to regularly host pub quizzes (aka trivia nights in some parts of our blue marble), and anyone who’s attended a few of my quizzes know that if it sounds like a trick question, it probably is. I’ve done more than a fair share of “True or False” rounds where the answer to all the questions was false but hardly anyone noticed the pattern because each and every single one of them were things that people believe but simply aren’t true. Wait, how does that relate to programming? Read on.

Programmers that comment on Hacker News or Proggit links are not a randomly sampled cross section of the industry. They’re better. As with anyone who’s ever attended a conference, they’re self selected individuals who are more passionate about their craft than the average bear. And yet, I see comments over and over again, from well-meaning savvy coders about beliefs and misconceptions that seem to be as widespread as they are provably false. Below are some of my favourites, with explanations as to what they mean.

C is magically fast.

I’ve written about this before. If anything on this list is going to get me downvoted, cause cognitive dissonance, and start flame wars, this will probably be the one.

As everything else in this blog post, I just… don’t understand. Maybe it’s because I learned C back when it was considered slow for games programming and only asm would do. Or maybe it’s that it all compiles down to machine code anyway, and I don’t harbour homeopathic-like tendencies to think that the asm, like water, has memory of whence it came, causing the CPU to execute it faster. Which brings me to…

GC languages are magically slow.

Where GC means “tracing GC”. If I had a penny for each time someone comments on a thread about how tracing GCs just aren’t acceptable when one does serious systems programming I’d have… a couple of pounds and/or dollars.

I kind of understand this one, given that I believed it myself until 4 years ago. I too thought that the magical pixies working in the background to clear up my mess “obviously” cause a program to run slower. I’ll do a blog post on this one specifically.

Emacs is a text-mode program.

Any time somebody argues that text editors can’t compete with IDEs, somebody invariably asks why they’d want to use a text-mode editor. I’m an Emacs user, and I don’t know why anyone would want to do that either. Similarly…

Text editors can’t and don’t have features like autocomplete, go to definition, …

This usually shows up in the same discussions where Emacs is a terminal program. It also usually comes up when someone says an IDE is needed because of the features above. I don’t program without them, I think it’d be crazy to. Then again, I’ve rarely seen anyone use their editor of choice well. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched someone open a file in vim, realise it’s not the one they want, close vim, open another file, close it again… aaarrrgh.

I’ve also worked with someone who “liked Eclipse”, but didn’t know “go to definition” was a thing. One wonders.

Given that the C ABI is the lingua franca of programming, the implementation should be written in C

C is the true glue language when it comes to binary. It got that way for historical reasons, but there’s no denying it reigns supreme in that respect. For reasons that dumbfound me, a lot of people take this to mean that if you have a C API, then obviously the only language you can implement it in is C. Never mind that the Visual Studio libc is written in C++, this is why you pick C!

C and C++ are the same language, and its real name is C/C++.

And nobody includes Objective C in there (which, unlike C++, is an actual superset of C), because… reasons? There are so many things that are common between the two of them that sometimes it makes sense to write C/C++ because whatever it is you’re saying applied to both of them. But that’s not how I see it used most of the time.

Rust is unique in its fearless concurrency.

I guess all the people writing Pony, D, Haskell, Erlang, etc. didn’t get the memo. Is it way safer than in C++? Of course it is, but that’s a pretty low bar to clear.

The first time I wrote anything in Rust it took me 30min to write a deadlock. Not what I call fearless. “Fearless absence of data races”? Not as catchy, I guess.

You can only write kernels in C

Apparently Haiku and Redox don’t exist. Or any number of unikernel frameworks.

The endianness of your platform matters.

This is another one that’s always confused me. I never even understood why `htons` and `ntohs` existed. There’s so much confusion over this, and I’ve failed so miserably at explaining it to other people, that I just point them to someone who’s explained it better than I can.

EDIT: I didn’t mean that endianness never matter, it’s just that 99.9% of the time people think it does, it doesn’t. I had to read up on IEEE floats once, but that doesn’t mean that in the normal course of programming I need to know which bits are the mantissa.

If your Haskell code compiles, it works!

Err… no. Just… no.

Simple languages get rid of complexity.

Also known as the “sweep the dust under the rug” fallacy.

EDIT: I apparently wasn’t clear about this. I mean that the inherent complexity of the task at hand doesn’t go away and might even be harder to solve with a simple language. There are many joke languages that are extremely simple but that would be a nightmare to code anything in.

Line coverage is a measure of test quality.

I think measuring coverage is important. I think looking at pretty HTML coverage reports helps to write better software. I’m confident that chasing line coverage targets is harmful and pointless. Here’s a silly function:

int divide(int x, int y) { return x + y }

Here’s the test suite:

TEST(divide) { divide(4, 2); }

100% test coverage. The function doesn’t even return the right answers to anything. Oops. Ok, ok, so we make sure we actually assert on something:

TEST(divide) { 
    assert(divide(4, 2) == 2); 
    assert(divide(6, 3) == 2);
}

int divide(int x, int y) { return 2; }

100% test coverage. Hmm…

TEST(divide) { 
    assert(divide(4, 2) == 2); 
    assert(divide(9, 3) == 3);
}

int divide(int x, int y) { return x / y; }

Success! Unless, of course, you pass in 0 for y…

Measure test coverage. Look at the reports. Make informed decisions on what to do next. I’ve also written about this before.

C maps closely to hardware.

If “hardware” means a PDP11 or a tiny embedded device, sure. There’s a reason you can’t write a kernel in pure C with no asm. And then there’s all of this: SIMD, multiple CPU cores, cache hiearchies, cache lines, memory prefetching, out-of-order execution, etc. At least it has atomics now.

I wonder if people will still say C maps closely to hardware when they’re writing code for quantum computers. It sounds silly, but I’ve heard worse.

Also, Lisp machines never existed and FPGAs/GPUs aren’t hardware (remember Poe’s law).

No other language can do X

No matter what your particular X is, Lisp probably can.

 

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2018/04/09
7 Comments
Programming

#include C headers in D code

I’ll lead with a file:

// stdlib.dpp
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void main() {
    printf("Hello world\n".ptr);

    enum numInts = 4;
    auto ints = cast(int*) malloc(int.sizeof * numInts);
    scope(exit) free(ints);

    foreach(int i; 0 .. numInts) {
        ints[i] = i;
        printf("ints[%d]: %d ".ptr, i, ints[i]);
    }

    printf("\n".ptr);
}

The keen eye will notice that, except for the two include directives, the file is just plain D code. Let’s build and run it:

% d++ stdlib.dpp
% ./stdlib
Hello world
ints[0]: 0 ints[1]: 1 ints[2]: 2 ints[3]: 3

Wait, what just happened?

You just saw a D file directly #include two headers from the C standard library and call two functions from them, which was then compiled and run. And it worked!

Why? I mean, just… why?

I’ve argued before that #include is C++’s killer feature. Interfacing to existing C or C++ libraries is, for me, C++’s only remaining use case. You include the relevant headers, and off you go. No bindings, no nonsense, it just works. As a D fan, I envied that. So this is my attempt to eliminate that “last” (again, for me, reasonable people may disagree) use case where one would reach for C++ as the weapon of choice.

There’s a reason C++ became popular. Upgrading to it from C was a decision with essentially 0 risk.  I wanted that “just works” feature for D.

How?

d++ is a compiler wrapper. By default it uses dmd to compile the D code, but that’s configurable through the –compiler option. But dmd can’t compile code with #include directives in it (the lexer won’t even like it!), so what gives?

d++ will go through a .dpp file, and upon encountering an #include directive it expands it in-place, similarly to what would happen with a C or C++ compiler. Differently from clang or gcc however, the header file can’t just be inserted in, since the syntax of the declarations is in a different language. So it uses libclang to parse the header, and translates all of the declarations on the fly. This is trickier than it sounds since C and C++ allow for things that aren’t valid in D.

There’s one piece of the usability puzzle that’s missing from that story: the preprocessor. C header files have declarations but also macros, and some of those are necessary to use the library as it was intended. One can try and emulate this with CTFE functions in D, and sometimes it works. But I don’t want “sometimes”, I want guarantees, and the only way to do that is… to use the C preprocessor.

Blasphemy, I know. But since worse is better, d++ redefines all macros in the included header file so they’re available for use by the D program. It then runs the C preprocessor on the result of expanding all the #include directives, and the final result is a regular D file that can be compiled by dmd.

What next?

Bug fixing and C++ support. I won’t be happy until this works:

#include <vector>
void main() {
    auto v = std.vector!int();
    v.push_back(42);
}

Code or it didn’t happen

I almost forgot: https://github.com/atilaneves/dpp.

 

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2018/03/22
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Programming

Keep D unittests separated from production code

D has built-in unit tests, and unittest is even a keyword. This has been fantastically successful for the language, since there is no need to use an external framework to write tests, it comes with the compiler. Just as importantly, a unittest after a function can be used as documentation, with the test(s) showing up as “examples”. This is the opposite approach of running code in documentation as tests in Python – generate documentation from the tests instead.

As such, in D (similarly to Rust), it’s usual, idiomatic even, to have the tests written next to the code they’re testing. It’s easy to know where to see examples of the code in action: scroll down a bit and there are the unit tests.

I’m going to argue that this is an anti-pattern.

Let me start by saying that some tests should go along with the production code. Exactly the kind of “examply” tests that only exercise the happy path. Have them be executable documentation, but only have one of those per function and keep them short. The others? Hide them away as you would in C++. Here’s why I think that’s the case:

They increase build times.

If you edit a test, and that test lives next to production code, then every module that imports that module has to be rebuilt, because there’s currently no good way to figure out whether or not any of the API/ABI of that module has changed. Essentially, every D module is like a C++ header, and you go and recompile the world. D compiles a lot faster than C++, but when you’re doing TDD (in my case, pretty much always), every millisecond in build times count.

If the tests are in their own files, then editing a test means that usually only one file needs to be recompiled. Since test code is code, recompiling production code and its tests takes longer than just compiling production code alone.

I’m currently toying with the idea of trying to compile per package for production code but per module for test code – the test code shouldn’t have any dependencies other than the production code itself. I’ll have to time it to make sure it’s actually faster.

version(unittest) will cause you problems if you write libraries.

Let’s say that you’re writing a library. Let’s also say that to test that library you want to have a dependency on a testing library from http://code.dlang.org/, like unit-threaded. So you add this to your dub.sdl:

configuration "default" {
}
configuration "unittest" {
     dependency "unit-threaded" version="~>0.7.0"
}

Normal build? No dependency. Test build? Link to unit-threaded, but your clients never have the extra dependency. Great, right? So you want to use unit-threaded in your tests, which means an import:

module production_code;
version(unittest) import unit_threaded;

Now someone goes and adds your library as a dependency in their dub.sdl, but they’re not using unit-threaded because they don’t want to. And now they get a compiler error because when they compile their code with -unittest, the compiler will try and import a module/package that doesn’t exist.

So instead, the library has to do this in their dub.sdl;

configuration "unittest" {
    # ...
    versions "TestingMyLibrary"
}

And then:

version(TestingMyLibrary) import unit_threaded;

It might even be worse – your library might have code that should exist for version(unittest) but not version(TestingMyLibrary) – it’s happend to me. Even in the standard library, this happened.

Keep calm and keep your tests separated.

You’ll be happier that way. I am.

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2018/02/12
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Programming

DSLs: even more important for tests

Last week I wrote about the benefits of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Since then I’ve been thinking and realised that DSLs are even more important when writing tests. It just so happened that I was writing tests in Emacs Lisp for a package I wrote called cmake-ide, and given that Lisp has macros I was trying to leverage them for expressiveness.

Like most other programmers, I’ve been known from time to time to want to raze a codebase to the ground and rewrite it from scratch. The reason I don’t, of course, was aptly put by Joel Spolsky years ago. How could I ensure that nobody’s code would break? How can I know the functionality is the same?

The answer to that is usually “tests”, but if you rewrite from scratch, your old unit tests probably won’t even compile. I asked myself why not, why is it that the tests I wrote weren’t reusable. It dawned on me that the tests are coupled to the production code, which is never a good idea. Brittle tests are often worse than no tests at all (no, really). So how to make them malleable?

What one does is to take a page from Cucumber and write all tests using a DSL, avoiding at all costs specifying how anything is getting done and focussing on what. In Lisp-y syntax, avoid:

(write-to-file "foo.txt" "foobarbaz")
(open-file "foo.txt")
(run-program "theapp" "foo.txt" "out.txt")
(setq result parse-output "out.txt")
;; assertion here on result

Instead:

(with-run-on-file "theapp" "foo.txt" "foobarbaz" "out.txt" result
     ;; assertion here on result

 

Less code, easier to read, probably more reusable. There are certainly better examples; I suggest consulting Cucumber best practices on how to write tests.

Not every language will offer the same DSL liberties and so your mileage may vary. Fortunately for me, the two languages I’d been writing tests in were Emacs Lisp and D, and in both of those I can go wild.

Tagged
2018/02/05
1 Comment
Programming

In defence of DSLs

I’ve often heard it said that DSLs make a codebase harder to understand, because programmers familiar with the language the codebase is written in now have to learn the DSL as well. Here’s my problem with that argument: every codebase is written in an embedded DSL. More often than not that DSL is ad-hoc, informally specified and bug-ridden, but a DSL all the same.

The syntax may be familiar to anyone who knows the general purpose language it’s written in, but the semantics are just as hard to grasp as any other DSL out there. Usually, harder to grasp, since there’s so much more code to read to understand what it is exactly that’s going on.

I can write C++. Does that mean I can download the source code for Firefox and jump straight in to fixing a bug? Of course not.

I really think that Lisp got it right, and that the next time I write any Emacs Lisp I really ought to think of what language I can express the problem domain better, then implement that language. It’s something that feels right but that somehow I’ve never actually really done.

It’s true that designing a DSL means designing a language, and that not all programmers are good language designers. But what’s the alternative? Use no abstractions? Let them write a giant mess for others to attempt to navigate?

In the end, isn’t the art of language design a way to state solutions to problems, simply? To capture the essence of what’s trying to be said/programmed elegantly?

I don’t know about you, but to me that just sounds like programming.

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