Attempt to find my way back to the point
where the digression regarding dependency-injection started.
As it turns out, this was a valuable digression, since we can rid ourselves
from lots of ad-hoc functionality, which basically does in a shitty way
what DependencyFactory now provides as standard solution
FIRST STEP is to expose the Navigator as generic "LocationQuery" service
through lib::Depend<LocationQuery>
more of a layout improvement, to avoid any code duplication.
The mechanics remain the same
- write an explicit specialisation
- trigger template intantiation within a dedicated translation unit
while switching various services to the new framework,
I noticed the requirement to create a service handle in not-yet-started mode
and then start it explicitly, maybe even from another thread. Thus I introduced
a no-arg default ctor for that purpose, but overlooked that the forwarding ctor
might also need zero arguments for default constructible service implementation
classes. Thus I've now introduced a marker ENUM for disambiguation
from now on, we'll have dedicated individual translation units (*cpp)
for each distinct interface proxy. All of these will include the
interfaceproxy.hpp, which now holds the boilerplate part of the code
and *must not be included* in anything else than interfac proxy
translation units. The reason is, we now *definie* (with external linkage)
implementations of the facade::Link ctor and dtor for each distinct
type of interface proxy. This allows to decouple the proxy definition code
from the service implementation code (which is crucial for plug-ins
like the GUI)
The recently rewritten lib::Depend front-end for service dependencies,
together with the configuration as lib::DependInject::ServiceInstance
provides all the necessary features and is even threadsafe.
Beyond that, the expectation is that also the instantiation of the
interface proxies can be simplified. The proxies themselves however
need to be hand-written as before
I am fully aware this change has some far reaching ramifications.
Effectively I am hereby abandoning the goal of a highly modularised Lumiera,
where every major component is mapped over the Interface-System. This was
always a goal I accepted only reluctantly, and my now years of experience
confirm my reservation: it will cost us lots of efforts just for the
sake of being "sexy".
SingletonRef was only invented because lib::Depend (or lib::Singleton at that time)
offered only on-demand initialisation, but could not attach to an external service.
But this is required for calling out at the implementation side of a
Lumiera Interface into the actual service implementation.
The recently created DependInject::ServiceInstance now fulfils this task way better
and is seamlessly integrated into the lib::Depend front-end
Actually this is on the implementation side only.
Since Layer-Separation-Interfaces route each call through a binding layer,
we get two Service-"Instances" to manage
- on the client side we have to route into the Lumiera Interface system
- on the implementation side the C-Language calls from the Interface system
need to get to the actual service implementation. The latter is now
managed and exposed via DependInject::ServiceInstance
...still using the FAKE implementation, not a real rules engine.
However, with the new Dependency-Injection framework we need to define
the actual class from the service-provider, not from some service-client.
This is more orthogonal, but we're forced to install a Lifecycle-Hook now,
in order to get this configuration into the system prior to any use
This is borderline yet acceptable;
A service might indeed depend on itself circularly
The concrete example is the Advice-System, which needs to push
the clean-up of AdviceProvicions into a static context. From there
the deleters need to call back into the AdviceSystem, since they have
no wey to find out, if this is an individual Advice being retracted,
or a mass-cleanup due to system shutdown.
Thus the DependencyFactory now invokes the actual deleter
prior to setting the instance-Ptr to NULL.
This sidesteps the whole issue with the ClassLock, which actually
must be already destroyed at that point, according to the C++ standard.
(since it was created on-demand, on first actual usage, *after* the
DependencyFactory was statically initialised). A workaround would be
to have the ctor of DependencyFactory actively pull and allocate the
Monitor for the ClassLock; however this seems a bit overingeneered
to deal with such a borderline issue
...and package the ZombieCheck as helper object.
Also rewrite the SyncClassLock_test to perform an
multithreaded contended test to prove the lock is shared and effective
Static initialisation and shutdown can be intricate; but in fact they
work quite precise and deterministic, once you understand the rules
of the game.
In the actual case at hand the ClassLock was already destroyed, and
it must be destroyed at that point, according to the standard. Simply
because it is created on-demand, *after* the initialisation of the
static DependencyFactory, which uses this lock, and so its destructor
must be called befor the dtor of DependencyFactory -- which is precisely
what happens.
So there is no need to establish a special secure "base runtime system",
and this whole idea is ill-guided. I'll thus close ticket #1133 as wontfix
Conflicts:
src/lib/dependable-base.hpp
When some dependency or singleton violates Lumiera's policy regarding destructors and shutdown,
we are unable to detect this violation reliably and produce a Fatal Error message.
This is due to lib::Depend's de-initialisating being itself tied to template generated
static variables, which unfortunately have a visibility scope beyond the translation unit
responsible for construction and clean-up.
- 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.
...which showed up under high system load.
The initialisation of the member variables for the check sum
could be delayed while the corresponding thread was already running
- polish the text in the TiddlyWiki
- integrate some new pages in the published documentation
Still mostly placeholder text with some indications
- fill in the relevant sections in the overview document
- adjust, expand and update the Doxygen comments
TODO: could convert the TiddlyWiki page to Asciidoc and
publish it mostly as-is. Especially the nice benchmarks
from yesterday :-D
This solution is considered correct by the experts.
Regarding the dependency-configuration part, we do not care too much about performance
and use the somewhat slower default memory ordering constraint
This is essentially the solution we used since start of the Lumiera project.
This solution is not entirely correct in theory, because the assignment to the
instance pointer can be visible prior to releasing the Mutex -- so another thread
might see a partially initialised object
_not_ using the dependency factory, rather direct access
- to a shared object in the enclosing stack frame
- to a heap allocated existing object accessed through uniqe_ptr
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.
the operation to run within the thread can be passed through as lambda;
and with the help of C++11 perfect forwarding we can get rid of the
temporary ThreadStartContext entirely, which removes a lot of
pass-through argument copying
...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...
This is a complete makeover of our lib::Depend and lib::DependencyFactory templates.
While retaining the basic idea, the configuration has been completely rewritten
to favour configuration at the point where a service is provided rather,
than at the point where a dependency is used.
Note: we use differently named headers, so the entire Lumiera
code base still uses the old implementation. Next step will be
to switch the tests (which should be drop-in)
Most dependencies within Lumiera are singletons and this approach remains adequate.
Singletons are not "EVIL" per se. But in some cases, there is an explicit
lifecycle, managed by some subsystem. E.g. some GUI services are only available
while the GTK event loop is running.
This special case can be integrated transparently into our lib::Depend<TY> front-end,
which defaults to creating a singleton otherwise.
we'll use a typedef to represent the default case
and provide the level within the UI-Tree as template parameter for the generic case
This avoids wrapping each definition into a builder function, which will be
the same function for 99% of the cases, and it looks rather compact and natural
for the default case, while still retaining genericity.
Another alternative would have been to inject the Tree-level at the invocation;
but doing so feels more like magic for me.
decided to add a very specific preprocessing here, to make the DSL notation more natural.
My guess is that most people won't spot the presence of this tiny bit of magic,
and it would be way more surprising to have rules like
UICoord::currentWindow().panel("viewer").create()
fail in most cases, simply because there is a wildcard on the perspective
and the panel viewer does not (yet) exist. In such a case, we now turn the
perspective into a "existential quantified" wildcard, which is treated as if
the actually existing element was written explicitly into the pattern.
especially std::find is relevant here.
I consider this only a preliminary solution and need to think it over
more in detail. But, judging from the description given in
http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/iterator
and
http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/concept/InputIterator
...the standard concept of "input iterator" seems to be closest to our
own concept, albeit it requires things like post increment, and a
reference_type convertible to value_type -- requirements we do not
necessarily support with our more limited "Lumiera Forward Iterator"
util::contains used to pick the overload for strings,
i.e. it first converted the UI-Coordinates to diagnostic output format
and then searched that string for '*' to determine if the pattern is explicit
works as expected, but not what you'd intend....
...and breaks spectacularly once you search for something as innocuous as '.'
when used in a pattern for matching against the UI tree,
an element marked as UIC_ELIDED = "." is treated as existentially quantified.
This means, we assume / verify there *is* an element at that level,
but we do not care about what this element actually is. Within the
implementation, the handling is similar to a wildcard, yet such a
spec is not classified as a wildcard (it *is* an explicit element,
just not explicitly named).
The relevant consequence is that such an element matches at a leaf
position, while match on wildcards on leaf positions is prohibited,
to prevent arbitrary and nonsensical wildcard matches against
open ended patterns. Especially we need such an existential pattern
to express a rule to create elements from scratch, but within a
specific window with arbitrary (but existing) perspective.
turns out to be somewhat tricky.
The easy shot would be to use the comma operator,
but I don't like that idea, since in logic programming, comma means "and then".
So I prefer an || operator, similar to short-circuit evaluation of boolean OR
Unfortunately, OR binds stronger than assignment, so we need to trick our way
into a smooth DSL syntax by wrapping into intermediary marker types, and accept
rvalue references only, as additional safeguard to enforce the intended inline
definition syntax typical for DSL usage.
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)
...as it turned out, the result type was the problem: the lambda we provide
typically does not yield an Allocator, but only its baseclass function<UICoord(UICoord)>
solution: make Allocator a typedef, we don't expect any further functionality
...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)
...this was quite an extensive digression, which basically gave us
a solid foundation for topological addressing and pattern matching
within the "interface space"
rationale: sometimes (likely this is even the standard case) we do not just
want to "extend", rather we want to extent at very specific levels.
This is easy to implement, based on the existing building blocks for path manipulation
the original construction works only as long as we stick to the "classical" Builder syntax,
i.e. use chained calls of the builder functions. But as soon as we just invoke
some builder function for sake of the side-effect on the data within the builder,
this data is destroyed and moved out into the value return type, which unfortunately
is being thrown away right afterwards.
Thus: either make a builder really sideeffect-free, i.e. do each mutation
on a new copy (which is kind of inefficient and counterfeits the whole idea)
or just accept the side-effect and return only a reference.
In this case, we can still return a rvalue-Reference, since at the end
we want to move the product of the build process out into the destination.
This works only due to the C++ concept of sequence points, which ensures
the original object stays alive during the whole evaluation of such a chained
builder expression.
NOTE: the TreeMutator (in namespace lib::diff) also uses a similar Builder construction,
but in *that* case we really build a new product in each step and thus *must*
return a value object, otherwise the reference would already be dangling the
moment we leave the builder function.
- the default should be to look for total coverage
- the predicates should reflect the actual state of the path only
- the 'canXXX' predicates test for possible covering mutation
