over time, we got quite a jungle with all those
shome-me-the-type-of helper functions.
Reduced and unified all those into
- typeString : a human readable, slightly simplified full type
- typeSymbol : a single word identifier, extracted lexically from the type
note: this changeset causes a lot of tests to break,
since we're using unmangeled type-IDs pretty much everywhere now.
Beore fixing those, I'll have to implement a better simplification
scheme for the "human readable" type names....
- remove unnecessary includes
- expunge all remaining usages of boost::format
- able to leave out the expliti string(elm) in output
- drop various operator<<, since we're now picking up
custom string conversions automatically
- delete diagnostics headers, which are now largely superfluous
- use newer helper functions occasionally
I didn't blindly change any usage of <iostream> though;
sometimes, just using the output streams right away
seems adequate.
- simple function to pick up the mangled type
- pretty-printing is implemented in format-obj.cpp
- also move the demangleCxx()-Function to that location,
it starts to be used for real, outside the test framework
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
The actual trick to make it work is to use decltype on the function operator
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7943525/is-it-possible-to-figure-out-the-parameter-type-and-return-type-of-a-lambda/7943765#7943765
In addition, we now pick up the functor by template type and
store it under that very type. For one, this cuts the size
of the generated class by a factor of two. And it gives the
compiler the ability to inline a closure as much as is possible,
especially when the created Binder / Mutator lives in the same
reference frame the closure taps into.
to carry out that rather obvious step, I was bound to consider
all the implications of choosing a given layout and handling pattern
for our external structure representation.
Finally, I settled upon the following decisions
- the value space represented within the DataCap is flat, not further structured
- the distinction between "attribute" and "nested object" is merely conceptual
and will be enforced solely by the diff detection / representation protocol
- basically, a nested subtree may appear as an attribute; the difference
between attributes and children lies solely in the way of access and referral:
by-name vs. positional
- it is pointless to save space for the representation of the discriminator ID
- but we can omit any further explicit type tag, because
- we do *not* support programming by switch-on-type, and thus
- we do *not* support full introspection, only a passive type-safety check
- this is *not* a limitation, since we acknowledge that GenNode is a *Monad*
- and the partial function needed within any flatMap implementation
maps naturally onto our Variant-Visitor; thus
- the DataCap can basically just *be* a Variant
- and GenNode has just to supply the neccessary shaffolding
to turn that into a full fledged Monad implementation, including
direct construction by wrapping a value and flatMap with tree walk
After some reconsideration, I decide to stick to the approach with the closures,
but to use a metaprotramming technique to build an inheritance chain.
While I can not decide on the real world impact of storing all those closures,
in theory this approach should enable the compiler to remove all of the
storage overhead. Since, when storing the result into an auto variable
right within scope (as demonstrated in the test), the compiler
sees the concrete type and might be able to boil down the actual
generated virtual function implementations, thereby inlining the
given closures.
Whereas, on the other hand, if we'd go the obvious conventional route
and place the closures into a Map allocated on the stack, I wouldn't
expect the compiler to do data flow analysis to prove this allocation
is not necessary and inline it away.
NOTE: there is now guarantee this inlining trick will ever work.
And, moreover, we don't know anything regarding the runtime effect.
The whole picture is way more involved as it might seem at first sight.
Even if we go the completely conventional route and require every
participating object to supply an implementation of some kind of
"Serializable" interface, we'll end up with a (hand written!)
implementation class for each participating setup, which takes
up space in the code segment of the executable. While the closure
based approach chosen here, consumes data segment (or heap) space
per instance for the functors (or function pointers) representing
the closures, plus code segment space for the closures, but the
latter with a way higher potential for inlining, since the closure
code and the generated virtual functions are necessarily emitted
within the same compilation unit and within a local (inline, not
publickly exposed) scope.
