...extract and improve the tuple-rewriting function
...improve instance tracking test dummy objects
...complete test coverage and verify proper memory handling
to cover the identified use-cases a wide variety of functors
must be accepted and adapted appropriately. A special twist arises
from the fact that the complete thread-wrapper component stack works
without RTTI; a derived class can not access the thread-wrapper internals
while the policy component to handle those hooks can not directly downcast
to some derived user provided class. But obviously at usage site it
can be expected to access both realms from such a callback.
The solution is to detect the argument type of the given functor
and to build a two step path for a safe static cast.
So this finally solves the fundamental problem regarding a race on
initialisation of the thread-wrapper; it does *not* solve the same problem
for classes deriving from thread-wrapper, which renders this design questionable
altogether -- but this is another story.
In the end, this initialisation-race is rooted in the very nature of starting a thread;
it seems there are the two design alternatives:
- expose the thread-creation directly to user code (offloading the responsibility)
- offer building blocks which are inherently dangerous
The EventLog seems to provide all the building blocks, but we need
some higher level special matchers (and maybe we also want to hide
some of the basic EventLog matchers). A soulution might be to wrap
the EventMatcher and delegate all follow-up builder calls.
This seems adequate, since the EventLog-Matcher is basically used as black box,
building up more elaborate matchers from the provided basic matchers...
Spent some time again to understand how EventLog matching works.
My feelings towards this piece of code are always the same: it is
somewhat too "tricky", but I am not aware of any other technique
to get this degree of elaborate chained matching on structured records,
short of building a dedicated matching engine from scratch.
The other alternative would be to use a flat textual log (instead of
the structured log records from EventLog), but then we'd have to
generate quite intricate regular expressions from the builder,
and I'm really doubtful it would be easier and clearer....
...turns out this is entirely generic and not tied to the context
within ActivityDetector, where it was first introduced to build a
mock functor to log all invocations.
Basically this meta-function generates a new instantiation of the
template X, using the variadic argument pack from template U<ARGS...>
...for coverage of the Activity-Language,
various invocations of unspecific functions must be verified,
with the additional twist that the implementation avoids indirections
and is thus hard to rig for tests.
Solution-Idea: provide a λ-mock to log any invocation into the
Event-Log helper, which was created some years ago to trace GUI communication...
Especially for the BlockFlow allocator, sanity checks are elided
for performance reasons; yet, generally speaking, it can be a very bad idea
to "optimise" away sanity checks. Thus an additional adaptor is provided
to layer such checks on top of an existing core; and IterEplorer now
always wires in this additional adaptor, and so the original behaviour
is now restored in this respect (and for the largest part of the code base)
...which uncovers further deeply nested problems,
especially when referring to non-copyable types.
Thus need to construct a common type that can be used
both to refer to the source elements and the expanded elements,
and use this common type as result type and also attempt to
produce better diagnostic messages on type mismatch....
...the improved const correctness on STL iterators uncovered another
latent problem with out diagnositc format helper, which provide
consistently rounded float and double output, but failed to take
CV-qualifiaction into account
This is a subtle and far reaching fix, which hopefully removes
a roadblock regarding a Dispatcher pipeline: Our type rebinding
template used to pick up nested type definitions, especially
'value_type' and 'reference' from iterators and containers,
took an overly simplistic approach, which was then fixed
at various places driven by individual problems.
Now:
- value_type is conceptually the "thing" exposed by the iterator
- and pointers are treated as simple values, and no longer linked
to their pointee type; rather we handle the twist regarding
STL const_iterator direcly (it defines a non const value_type,
which is sensible from the STL point of view, but breaks our
generic iterator wrapping mechanism)
To complete the mock setup, the next step would be to extend the GenNode-based spec langage
to allow defining prerequisite Mock-JobTickets. Setting this up seems rather straight forward --
however, defining a simple testcase to cover this extension runs into surprisingly tricky problems..
- for one, the singleValIterator from Itertools has serious difficulties handling references
- but even more surprising, it seems impossible to make the "prerequisites iterator"
fit into the Tree-Explorer framework (which I intend to use as replacement
for the monadic approach)
after some extended analysis of generic types and template instances,
it seems that not TreeExplorer as such is the primary problem, but rather
there is a conceptual mismatch somewhere deep down in Itertools or Iter-Adapter
This macro has turned out to be quite useful in cases
where a generic setup / algorithm / builder need to be customised
with λ adaptors for binding to local or custom types. It relies
on the metafunctions defined in lib/meta/function.hpp to match
the signature of "anything function-like"; so this seems the
proper place to provide that macro alongside
...requires a first attempt towards defining a `JobTiket`.
This turns out quite tricky, due to using those `LinkedElements`
(intrusive single linked list), which requires all added records
actually to live elsewhere. Since we want to use a custom allocator
later (the `AllocationCluster`), this boils down to allocating those
records only when about to construct the `JobTicket` itself.
What makes matters even worse: at the moment we use a separate spec
per Media channel (maybe these specs can be collapsed later non).
And thus we need to pass a collection -- or better an iterator
with raw specs, which in turn must reveal yet another nested
sequence for the prerequisite `JobTickets`.
Anyhow, now we're able at least to create an empty `JobTicket`,
backed by a dummy `JobFunctor`....
The header "format-cout.hpp" offers a convenience function
to print pretty much any object or data in human readable form.
However, the formatter for pointers used within this framework
switched std::cout into hexadecimal display of numbers and failed
to clean-up this state.
Since the "stickyness" of IOS stream manipulators is generally a problem,
we now provide a RAII helper to capture the previous stream state and
automatically restore it when leaving the scope.
Complete the investigation and turn the solution into a generic
mix-in-template, which can be used in flexible ways to support
this qualifier notation.
Moreover, recapitulate requirements for the ElementBoxWidget
...in an attempt to clarify why numerous cross links are not generated.
In the end, this attempt was not very successful, yet I could find some breadcrumbs...
- file comments generally seem to have a problem with auto link generation;
only fully qualified names seem to work reliably
- cross links to entities within a namespace do not work,
if the corresponding namespace is not documented in Doxygen
- documentation for entities within anonymous namespaces
must be explicitly enabled. Of course this makes only sense
for detailed documentation (but we do generate detailed
documentation here, including implementation notes)
- and the notorious problem: each file needs a valid @file comment
- the hierarchy of Markdown headings must be consistent within each
documentation section. This entails also to individual documented
entities. Basically, there must be a level-one heading (prefix "#"),
otherwise all headings will just disappear...
- sometimes the doc/devel/doxygen-warnings.txt gives further clues
...by relying on the newly implemented automatic standard binding
Looks like a significant improvement for me, now the actual bindings
only details aspects, which are related to the target, and no longer
such technicalitis like how to place a Child-Mutator into a buffer handle
the reason for the failure, as it turned out,
is that 'noexcept' is part of the function signature since C++17
And, since typically a STL container has const and non-const variants
of the begin() and end() function, the match to a member function pointer
became ambuguous, when probing with a signature without 'noexcept'
However, we deliberately want to support "any STL container like" types,
and this IMHO should include types with a possibly throwing iterator.
The rationale is, sometimes we want to expose some element *generator*
behind a container-like interface.
At this point I did an investigation if we can emulate something
in the way of a Concept -- i.e. rather than checking for the presence
of some functions on the interface, better try to cover the necessary
behaviour, like in a type class.
Unfortunately, while doable, this turns out to become quite technical;
and this highlights why the C++20 concepts are such an important addition
to the language.
So for the time being, we'll amend the existing solution
and look ahead to C++20
When invoking the util::toString conversion, we indeed to want any conversion,
including explicit conversion operators. However, probing the possibility to build a string
can be dangerous, since there is a string constructor from characters, and
integral types can be converted to characters.
OTOH, leaving out explicit conversions is likewise not desirable, since there are
class types, which deliberately do not offer an implicit conversion, but allow
explicit conversion for dump and diagnostic output. The notorious example for
such a situation is the lib::idi::EntryID<TY>. We certainly do not want an
EntryID to be converted into a string without further notice, but we do want
an EntryID to be automatically rendered to string in diagnostic output, since
this will include the human readable ID part.
See especially: 8432420726
Now we'll attempt to get out of this dilemma by probing explicitly for the presence
of a string conversion operator, which will fail for any non-class types, thereby
ruling out all those nasty indirect type -> character -> string conversion paths.
The rationale is: if someone queries the predicate can_convertToString, the intention
is really to get an string rendering, and not just to invoke some random function
with an string argument.
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.
The Lumiera thread-wrapper accepts the operation to be performed
within the new thread as a function object, function reference or lambda.
Some of these types can be directly instantiated in the threadMain
function, and thus possibly inlined altogether. This is especially
relevant for Lambdas. OTOH, we can not instantiate function references
or bound member functions; in those cases we fall back to using a
std::function object, possibly incurring heap allocations.
seems to be the most orthogonal way to strip adornments from the SIG type
Moreover, we want to move the functor into the closure, where it will be stored anyay.
From there on, we can pass as const& into the binder (for creating the partially closed functor)
...but not yet able to get it to compile.
Problem seems to be the generic lambda, which is itself a template.
Thus we need a way to instantiate that template with the correct arguments
prior to binding it into a std::function
been there, seen that recently (-> TreeExplorer, the Expander had a similar problem)
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.
due to switching from ADL extension points to member functions,
we now need to detect a "state core" type in a different fashion.
The specific twist is that we can not spell out the full signature
in all cases, since the result type will be formed as a consequence
of this type detection. Thus there are now additional detectors to
probe for the presence of a specific function name only, and the
distinction between members and member functions has been sharpened.
- always layer the TreeExplorer (builder) on top of the stack
- always intersperse an IterableDecorator in between adjacent layers
- consequently...
* each layer implementation is now a "state core"
* and the source is now always a Lumiera Iterator
This greatly simplifies all the type rebindings and avoids the
ambiguities in argument converison. Basically now we can always convert
down, and we just need to pick the result type of the bound functor.
Downside is we have now always an adaptation wrapper in between,
but we can assume the compiler is able to optimise such inline
accessors away without overhead.
Obsoletes and replaces the ad-hoc written type rebindings from
iter-adapter and friends. The new scheme is more consistent and does
less magic, which necessitates an additional remove_pointer<IT> within
the iterator adaptors. Rationale is, "pointer" is treated now just as
a primitive type without additional magic or unwrapping, since it is
impossible to tell generically if the pointer or the pointee was
meant to be the "value"
Oh well.
This kept me busy a whole day long -- and someone less stubborn like myself
would probably supect a "compiler bug" or put the blame on the language C++
So to stress this point: the compiler behaved CORRECT
Just SFINAE is dangerous stuff: the metafunction I concieved yesterday requires
a complete type, yet, under rather specific circumstances, when instantiating
mutually dependent templates (in our case lib::diff::Record<GenNode> is a
recursive type), the distinction between "complete" and "incomplete"
becomes blurry, and depends on the processing order. Which gave the
misleading impression as if there was a side-effect where the presence
of one definition changes the meaning of another one used in the same
program. What happened in fact was just that the evaluation order was
changed, causing the metafunction to fail silently, thus picking
another specialisation.
- we do strip references
- we delegate to nested typedefs
Hoever, we do *not* treat const or pointers in any way special --
if the user want to strip or level these, he has to do so explicitly.
Initially it seemed like a good idea to do something clever here, but
on the long run, such "special treatment" is just good for surprises
...automatically whenever those are present.
Up to now, we hat that as base case, which limited usage to those cases
where we already know such nested definitions are actually present
This is a consequence of the experiments with generic lambdas.
Up to now, lib::meta::_Fun<F> failed with a compilation error
when passing the decltype of such a generic lambda.
The new behaviour is to pick the empty specialisation (std::false_type) in such cases,
allowing to guard explicit specialisations when no suitable functor type
is passed
as it turned out, the solution from yesterday works only with uniform argument lists,
but not with arbitrarily mixed types. Moreover the whole trickery with the
indices was shitty -- better use a predicate decision on template argument level.
This simple solution somehow just didn't occur to me...