...it should have been this way all the time.
Generic code might otherwise be ill guided to assume a conversion
from the Iterator to its value type, while in fact an explicit dereferentiation is necessary
The intention is to augment the iterator based (linear) search
used in EventLog to allow for real backtracking, based on a evaluation tree.
This should be rather staight forward to implement, relying on the
exploreChildren() functionality of TreeExplorer. The trick is to package
the chained search step as a monadic flatMap operation
we did an unnecessary copy of the argument, which was uncovered
by the test case manipulating the state core.
Whew.
Now we have a beautiful new overengineered solution
outift the Filter base class with the most generic form of the Functor
wrapper, and rather wrap each functor argument individually. This allows
then to combine various kinds of functors
...this solution works, but has a shortcoming:
the type of the passed lambdas is effectively pinned to conform
with the signature of the first lambda used initially when building the filter.
Well, this is the standard use case, but it kind of turns all the
tricky warpping and re-binding into a nonsense excercise; in this form
the filter can only be used in the monadic case (value -> bool).
Especially this rules out all the advanced usages, where the filter
collaborates with the internals of the source.
while this is basically just code code cosmetics,
at least it marks this as a very distinct special case,
and keeps the API for the standard Filter layer clean.
a quite convoluted construct built from several nested generic lambdas.
When investigated in the debugger, the observed addresses and the
invoked code looks sane and as expected.
The intention is to switch from the itertools-based filter
to the filter available in the TreeExplorer framework.
Thus "basically" we just need to copy the solution over,
since both are conceptually equivalent.
However...... :-(
The TreeExplorer framework is designed to be way more generic
and accepts basically everything as argument and tries to adapt apropriately.
This means we have to use a lot of intricate boilerplate code,
just to get the same effect that was possible in Itertools with
a simple and elegant in-place lambda assignment
Fillter needs to be re-evaluated, when an downstream entity requests
expandChildren() onto an upstream source. And obviously the ordering
of the chained calls was wrong here.
As it turns out, I had discovered that necessity to re-evaluate with
the Transformer layer. There is a dedicated test case for that, but
I cut short on verifying the filter in that situation as well, so
that piece of broken copy-n-paste code went through undetected.
This is in fact a rather esoteric corner case, because it is only
triggered when the expandChildren() call is passed through the filter.
When otoh the filter sits /after/ the entity generating the expandChildren()
calls, everything works as intended. And the latter is the typical standard
usage situation of an recursive evalutation algorithm: the filter is here
used as final part to drive the evaluation ahead and pick the solutions.
There is a bug or shortcoming in the existing ErrorLog matcher implementation.
It is not really difficult to fix, however doing so would require us to intersperse
yet another helper facility into the log matcher. And it occurred to me, that
this helper would effectively re-implement the stack based backtracking ability,
which is already present in TreeExplorer (and was created precisely to support
this kind of recursive evaluation strategies).
Thus I intend to switch the implementation of the EventLog matcher from the
old IterTool framework to the newer TreeExplorer framework. And this intention
made me re-read the code, fixing several comments and re-thinking the design
seemingly my quick-n-dirty implementation was to naiive.
We need real backtracking, if we want to support switches
in the search direction (match("y").after("x").before("z")
Up to now, I have cheated myself around this obvious problem :-/
The boost::hash documentation does not mention a significant change in that area,
yet the frequent collisions on identifiers with number suffix do not occur anymore
in Boost 1.65
- state-of-the-art implementation of access with Double Checked Locking + Atomics
- improved design for configuration of dependencies. Now at the provider, not the consumer
- support for exposing services with a lifecycle through the lib::Depend<SRV> front-end
...which declare DependencyFactory as friend.
Yes, we want to encourrage that usage pattern.
Problem is, std::is_constructible<X> gives a misleading result in that case.
We need to do the instantiation check within the scope of DependencyFactory
ideally we want
- just a plain unique_ptr
- but with custom deleter delegating to lib::Depend
- Depend can be made fried to support private ctor/dtor
- reset the instance-ptr on deletion
- always kill any instance
all these tests are ported by drop-in replacement
and should work afterwards exactly as before (and they do indeed)
A minor twist was spotted though (nice to have more unit tests indeed!):
Sometimes we want to pass a custom constructor *not* as modern-style lambda,
but rather as direct function reference, function pointer or even member
function pointer. However, we can not store those types into the closure
for later lazy invocation. This is basically the same twist I run into
yesterday, when modernising the thread-wrapper. And the solution is
similar. Our traits class _Fun<FUN> has a new typedef Functor
with a suitable functor type to be instantiated and copied. In case of
the Lambda this is the (anonymous) lamda class itself, but in case of
a function reference or pointer it is a std::function.
...written as byproduct from the reimplementation draft.
NOTE there is a quite similar test from 2013, DependencyFactory_test
For now I prefer to retain both, since the old one should just continue
to work with minor API adjustments (and thus prove this rewrite is a
drop-in replacement).
On the long run those two tests could be merged eventually...
...but not yet switched into the main LocationQuery interface,
because that would also break the existing implementation;
recasting this implementation is the next step to do....
...which basically allows us to return any suitable implementation
for the child iterator, even to switch the concrete iteration on each level.
We need this flexibility when implementing navigation through a concrete UI
...at least when using a wrapped Lumiera Iterator as source.
Generally speaking, this is a tricky problem, since real mix-in interfaces
would require the base interface (IterSource) to be declared virtual.
Which incurres a performance penalty on each and every user of IterSource,
even without any mix-in additions. The tricky part with this is to quantify
the relevance of such a performance penalty, since IterSource is meant
to be a generic library facility and is a fundamental building block
on several component interfaces within the architecture.
This is just a temporary solution, until IterSource is properly refactored (#1125)
After that, IterSource is /basically a state core/ and the adaptor will be more or less trivial
- as it stands currently, IterSource has a design problem, (see #1125)
- and due to common problems in C++ with mix-ins and extended super interfaces,
it is surprisingly tricky to build on an extension of IterSource
- thus the idea is to draft a new solution "in green field"
by allowing TreeExplorer to adapt IterSource automatically
- the new sholution should be templated on the concrete sub interface
and ideally even resolve the mix-in-problem by re-linearising the
inheritance line, i.e. replace WrappedLumieraIter by something
able to wrap its source, in a similar vein as TreeExplorer does
several extensions and convenience features are conceivable,
but I'll postpone all of them for later, when actual need arises
Note especially there is one recurring design challenge, when creating
such a demand-driven tree evaluation: more often than not it turns out
that "downstream" will need some information about the nested tree structure,
even while, on the surfice, it looks as if the evaluation could be working
completely "linearised". Often, such a need arises from diagnostic features,
and sometimes we want to invoke another API, which in turn could benefit
from knowing something about the original tree structure, even if just
abstracted.
I have no real solution for this problem, but implementing this pipeline builder
leads to a pragmatic workaround: since the iterator already exposes a expandChildren(),
it may as well expose a depth() call, even while keeping anything beyond that
opaque. This is not the clean solution you'd like, but it comes without any
overhead and does not really break the abstraction.
...so sad.
The existing implementation was way more elegant,
just it discarded an exahusted parent element right while in expansion,
so effectively the child sequence took its place. Resolved that by
decomposing the iterNext() operation. And to keep it still readable,
I make the invariant of this class explicit and check it (which
caught yet another undsicovered bug. Yay!)
instead of building a very specific collaboration,
rather just pass the tree depth information over the extended iterator API.
This way, "downstream" clients *can* possibly react on nested scope exploration
We get conflicting goals here:
- either the child expansion happens within the opaque source data
and is thus abstracted away
- or the actual algorithm evaluation becomes aware of the tree structure
and is thus able to work with nested evaluation contexts and a local stack
...build on top of the core features of TreeExplorer
- completely encapsulate and abstract the source data structure
- build an backtracking evaluation based on layered evaluation
of this abstracted expandable data source
NOTE: test passes compilation, but doesn't work yet
...and there is a point where to stop with the mere technicalities,
and return to a design in accordance with the inner nature of things.
Monads are a mere technology, without explicatory power as a concept or pattern
For that reason
- discard the second expansion pattern implemented yesterday,
since it just raises the complexity level for no given reason
- write a summary of my findings while investigating the abilities
of Monads during this design excercise.
- the goal remains to abandon IterExplorer and use the now complete
IterTreeEplorer in its place. Which also defines roughly the extent
to wich monadic techniques can be useful for real world applications
...it can sensibly only be done within the Expander itself.
Question: is this nice-to-have-feature worth the additional complexity
of essentially loading two quite distinct code paths into a single
implementation object?
As it stands, this looks totally confusing to me...
At that time, our home-made Tuple type was replaced by std::tuple,
and then the command framework was extended to also allow command invocation
with arguments packaged as lib::diff::Record<GenNode>
With changeset 0e10ef09ec
A rebinding from std::tuple<ARGS...> to Types<ARGS> was introduced,
but unfortunately this was patched-in on top of the existing Types<ARGS...>
just as a partial specialisation.
Doing it this way is especially silly, since now this rebinding also kicks
in when std::tuple appears as regular payload type within Types<....>
This is what happened here: We have a Lambda taking a std::tuple<int, int>
as argument, yet when extracting the argument type, this rebinding kicks in
and transforms this argument into Types<int, int>
Oh well.
this leads to either unfolding the full tree depth-first,
or, when expanding eagerly, to delve into each sub-branch down to the leaf nodes
Both patterns should be simple to implement on top of what we've built already...
IterSource should be refactored to have an iteration control API similar to IterStateWrapper.
This would resolve the need to pass that pos-pointer over the abstraction barrier,
which is the root cause for all the problems and complexities incurred here
