The way we build this attribute binding, there is no single
entity to handle all attribute bindings. Thus the only way
to detect a missing binding is when none of the binding layers
was able to handle a given INS verb
the idea is again to perform the same sequence of primitives,
this time with a binding to some local variables within the test function
here to enact the role of "object fields"
together with drafting the first segment of the test code,
I've settled down onto an implementation approach
the plan is to use this specific diff sequence
both in the individual binding tests, and in a
more high level integration test. Hopefully this
helps to make these quite technical tests more readable
..as concluded from the preceding analysis.
NOTE this entails a semantical change, since this
predicate is now only meant to be indicative, not conclusive
remarks: the actual implementation of the diff application process
as bound via the TreeMutator remains yet to be written...
how can ordinary object fields be treated as "Attributes"
and thus tied into the Diff framework defined thus far.
This turns out to be really tricky, even questionable
while simple to add into the implementation, this whole feature
seems rather qestionable to me now, thus I've added a Ticket
to be revisited later.
In a nutshell, right here, when implementing the binding layer
for STL collections, it is easy to enable the framework to treat
Ref::THIS properly, but the *actual implementation* will necessarily
be offloaded onto each and every concrete binding implementation.
Thus client code would have to add support for an rather obscure
shortcut within the Diff language. The only way to avoid this
would be to change the semantics of the "match"-lambda: if this
binding would rather be a back-translation of implementation data
into GenNode::ID values, then we'd be able to implement Ref::THIS
natively. But such an approach looks like a way inferiour deisgn
to me; having delegated the meaning of a "match" to the client
seems like an asset, since it is both natural and opens a lot
of flexibility, without adding complexity.
For that reason I tend to avoid that shortcut now, in the hope
to be able to drop it entirely from the language
...all of this implementation boils down to slightly adjusting
the code written for the test-mutation-target. Insofar it pays off now
having implemented this diagnostic and demonstration first.
Moreover I'm implementing this basic scheme of "diff application"
roughly the fourth time, thus things kindof fall into place now.
What's really hard is all those layers of abstraction in between.
Lesson learned (after being off for three weeks, due to LAC and
other obligations): I really need to document the meaning of the
closures, and I need to document the "abstract operational semantics"
of diff application, otherwise no one will be able to provide
the correct closures.
the whole implementation will very much be based on
my experiences with the TestMutationTarget and TestWireTap.
Insofar it was a good idea to implement this test dummy first,
as a prototype. Basically what emerges here is a standard pattern
how to implement a tree mutator:
- the TreeMutator will be a one-way-off "throwaway" object.
- its lifecylce starts with sucking away the previous contents
- consuming the diff moves contents back in place
- thus the mutator always attaches onto a target by reference
and needs the ability to manipulate the target
the collection binding can be configured with various
lambdas to supply the basic building blocks of the generated binding.
Since we allow picking up basically anything (functors,
function pointers, function objects, lamdas), and since
we speculate on inlining optimisation of lambdas, we can not
enforce a specific signature in the builder functions.
But at least we can static_assert on the effective signature
at the point where we're generating the actual binding configuration
re-evaluated the decision to build on lambdas, not virtual functions:
- it leads for sure to clearer code at the usag site
- it /might/ offer better, but certainly not worse potential for compiler optimisation
...and write down some insights about the architecure
and design of tree binding and tree description related
to the TreeMutator.
When reading my notes from last year, it became clear
to me that the design of the TreeMutator has evolved
significantly, and became quite something different
than I'd imagined at start
now the full API for the "mutation primitives" is shaped.
Of course the actual implementation is missing, but that
should be low hanging fuit by now.
What still requires some thinking though is how to implement
the selector, so we'll actually get a onion shaped decorator
basically we'll establish a collaboration where both sides
know only the interface (contract) of the partner; a safe margin
for allocation size has to be established through metaprogramming (TODO)
...basically we've now the list mutation primitives working,
albeit in a test/dummy implementation only. Next steps will
be to integrate the assignment and sub scope primitives,
and then to re-do the same implementation respectively
for the case of mutating a standard collection of arbitrary type
now this feels like making progress again,
even when just writing stubs ;-)
Moreover, it became clear that the "typing" of typed child collections
will always be ad hoc, and thus needs to be ensured on a case by case
base. As a consequence, all mutation primitives must carry the
necessary information for the internal selector to decide if this
primitive is applicable to a given decorator layer. Because
otherwise it is not possible to uphold the concept of a single,
abstracted "source position", where in fact each typed sub-collection
of children (and thus each "onion layer" in the decorator chain)
maintains its own private position
after sleeping one night over the problem, this seems to be
the most natural solution, since the possibility of assignment
naturally arises from the fact that, for tree diff, we have
to distinguish between the *identity* of an element node and
its payload (which could be recursive). Thus, IFF the payoad
is an assignable value, why not allow to assign it. Doing so
elegnatly solves the problem with assignment of attributes
Signed-off-by: Ichthyostega <prg@ichthyostega.de>
This basically finishes definition of the fundamental
UI-Element and Bus protocol -- with one notable exception:
how to mutate elements by diff.
This will be the next topic to address
...and I made the decision *not* to consider any kind of
generic properties for now. YAGNI.
UI coding is notorious spaghetti code.
No point in fighting that, it is just the way it is,
because somewhere you're bound to get concrete, hands-on.
still TODO: the ability to use immutable types
within the command framework. In theory, this
shouldn't be had to implement, since we're creating
a new opaque value holder within the command registry
anyway, so it should be sufficient to refrain from
re-assigning a new value tuple. This is relevant,
since e.g. our time framework is built on immutable
value types.
as it turns out, this is a Bug in GCC 4.9 (resolved in 5.x)
See https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=63723
Problem is, GCC emits a warning on narrowing conversions,
while the standard actually disallows them when building
objects from brace-enclosed initialisers.
Unfortunately GCC also emits such a warning from within
a SFINAE context, instead of letting those spurious dangerous
cases fail. So we end up with additional visitor double dispatch
paths, and a lot of additional warnings.
Temporary solution is to hack a custom trait, which
explicitly declares some conversions paths as "narrowing".
Probably this can be implemented in a way more intelligent
way (using std::numeric_limits), but this doesn't seem
worth the effort, since the problem will go away through
compiler evolution eventually.
now we're able to construct suitable parameter values from the
arguments passed embedded in the GenNodes, as is demonstrated with the
EntryID<long> constructed from an ID-string. We really need a full-blown
double-dispatch, since the content type of the concrete GenNode is only
known at runtime (encoded in the RTTI)
There is still the problem with generating some spurions additional
conversion pathes, some of which are narrowing (and thus dangerous).
The copiler emits several warnings here, and all of them are justified.
E.g. it would be possible to pass an int64_t in the GenNode and initialise
a short from it. This might be convenient at times, but I tend rather to
be prohibitive here and thus consider to built in distinct limitations
on the allowed conversions.
First part is to define the steps (the protocol) at the
model element level, which gets a command prepared and invoked.
Test fails still, because there is no actual argument binding
invoked in the TestNexus
the initial draft of this concept is in place now, and
the first round of unit tests pass. I've got some understanding
of the purpose of the interactions and involved elements
and I'm confident this design is evolving in a sane way.
Note: extensive documentation is in the TiddlyWiki,
here I've just pasted and reworded some paragraphs from there
and integrated them into the Doxygen docs
next step will be to rig the mock element and set up
and cover the basic / generic element behaviour
This changeset
- adapts the (planned) unit test to the semantic of
the EventLog, which is now fully implemented
- adjusts the function names on the public Tangible interface,
to be better in line with the naming convention of the
corrsponding operations on the UI-Bus:
* "mark" operations are towards the UI element
* "note" messages are from the UI element towards some
state manager, which can be reached via the bus
what you see here now is just the tip of the icebearg...
If we follow this route, the Lumiera UI will become way more
elaborate and responsive than average desktop applications
looked at
- boost property_tree
- boost spirit
- JSON-C
- JsonCpp
- rapidjson
- vjson / gason
the results where quite obvious: --> rapidjson
Rationale: we do not want yet another object system;
rapidjson has an SAX-style API (and additionally an DOM API
if needed). And it is fast, supports in-situ parsing,
extended Unicode support, full JSON support and
an exchangable allocator.
License is MIT
NOTE: we have the policy to always support current Debian/stable
amd at least one Ubuntu LTS release, unless hard dependency problems prevent that.
Currently, Ubuntu/Trusty is already a bit dated, but the only problematic dependency
could be libboost (1.54 in Trusty, 1.55 in Jessie).
GCC-4.8 can be replaced by GCC-4.9 in Trusty without problems
It is always a bit tricky to find out the precise lower boundary,
so we try to upgrade these requirements as our platform progresses.
For now we have used the level available on Ubuntu/Trusty to set
the lower constraints for most libraries
This is a development snaphot pre release of Lumiera.
It features codebase maintenance, upgrade to C++14 and GTK-3
and some work towards a Proc-GUI connection (unfinished)
Update README, AUTHORS, LICENSE and similar release docs.
because otherwise we'd need to send a whole subtree
over the wire and then descend into it just to find an element.
This too is a ripple effect of making '==' deep
well... this was quite a piece of work
Added some documentation, but a complete documentation,
preferably to the website, would be desirable, as would
be a more complete test covering the negative corner cases
It is difficult to reconcile our general architecture for the
linearised diff representation with the processing of recursive,
tree-like data structures. The natural and most clean way to
deal with trees is to use recursion, i.e. the processor stack.
But in our case, this means we'd have to peek into the next
token of the language and then forward the diff iterator
into a recursive call on the nested scope. Essentially, this
breaks the separation between receiving a token sequence and
interpretation for a concrete target data structure.
For this reason, it is preferrable to make the stack an
internal state of the concrete interpreter. The downside of
this approach is the quite confusing data storage management;
we try to make the role of the storage elements a bit more
clear through descriptive accessor functions.
each language token of our "linearised diff representation"
carries a payload data element, which typically is the piece
of data to be altered (added, mutated, etc).
Basically, these elements have value semantics and are
"sent over wire", and thus it seems natural when the
language interpreter functions accept that piece of payload
by-value. But since we're now sending GenNode elements as
parameter data in our diff, which typically are of the
size of 10 data elements (640 bit on a 64bit machine),
it seems more resonable to pass these argument elements
by const& through the interpreter function. This still
means we can (and will indeed) copy the mutated data
values when applying the diff, but we're able to
relay the data more efficiently to the point where
it's consumed.
this boils down to the two alternatives
- manipulate the target data structure
- build an altered copy
since our goal is to handle large tree structures efficiently,
the decision was cast in favour of data manipulation
so basically it's time to explicate the way
our diff language will actually be written.
Similar to the list diff case, it's a linear sequence
of verb tokens, but in this case, the payload value
in each token is a GenNode. This is the very reason
why GenNode was conceived as value object with an
opaque DataCap payload
Initially I intended just to supply an addapter to use
the monadic IterExplorer for this recursive expansion
of GenNode contents. Investigating this approach was
relevant to highlight the minimum requirements for
such an evaluation mechanics: since our GenNode
is an hierarchical structure without back-links,
we are bound to use a stack at some point. And
since an Iterator is a materialised continuation,
we can not use the processor stack and are forced
to represent this stack in memory.
Yet, on second thought, we do not need the full power
of the IterExplorer monad; especially we do not need
to bind arbitrary functions into the monad, just one
single scope exploring function, implemented as
Variant visitor. Based on these observations, we can
"inline" the monad structure into a double nested
iterator, where the outer capsule carries a stack
of scopes to be explored.
remembered that some years ago I had to deal with a very similar problem
for planning the frame rendering jobs. It turned out, that the
iterator monad developed for this looks promising for our task at hand
especially setting (changing) attributes turned out to be tricky,
since in case of a GenNode this would mean to re-bind the hash ID;
we can not possibly do that properly without knowing the type of the payload,
and by design this payload type is opaque (erased).
As resort, I changed the semantics of the assign operation:
now it rather builds a new payload element, with a given initialiser.
In case of the strings, this ends up being the same operation,
while in case of GenNode, this is now something entirely different:
we can now build a new GenNode "in place" of the old one, and both
will have the same symbolic ID (attribute key). Incidentally,
our Variant implementation will reject such a re-building operatinon
when this means to change the (opaque) payload type.
in addition, I created a new API function on the Mutator,
allowing to move-in a complete attribute object. Actually this
new function became the working implementation. This way, it is
still possible to emplace a new attribute efficiently (consider
this to be a whole object graph!). But only, if the key (ID)
embedded in the attribute object is already what is the intended
key for this attribute. This way, we elegantly circumvent the
problem of having to re-bind a hash ID without knowing the type seed
OMG, what was all this about?
OK... this cant possibly work this way.
At least we need to trim after splitting the attributes.
But this is not enough, we want the value, which implies
to make the type flexible (since we cant return a const& to
a substring extracted on-the-fly)
especially I've now decided how to handle const-ness:
We're open to all forms of const-ness, the actual usage decides.
const GenNode will only expose a const& to the data values
still TODO is the object builder notation for diff::Record
on a second thought, this "workaround" does not look so bad,
due to the C++11 feature to request the default implementation explicitly.
Maybe we'll never need a generic solution for these cases
This is just a draft for now -- kindof a by-catch, since it is
chep to build that DSL on top of the Rec::Mutator.
This DSL could be of value later, when it comes to define
some configuration data inline, in a copact and clear fashion,
without the need to use a bridge to/from JSON
for the purpose of working out the inner logic, I frequently use the
help of a mindmap -- so why not commiting this alongside? For sure,
it is preliminary and the worked out concepts will be cast in code
and documented on the website. Yet the thought-process leading to
these decisions might be of some interest, at least for myself.
