- Make passing the position to `forceValue` mandatory,
this way we remember people that the position is
important for better error messages
- Add pos to all `forceValue` calls
there's a few symbols in primops we can create once and pick them out of
EvalState afterwards instead of creating them every time we need them. this
gives almost 1% speedup to an uncached nix search.
constructing an ostringstream for non-string concats (like integer addition) is
a small constant cost that we can avoid. for string concats we can keep all the
string temporaries we get from coerceToString and concatenate them in one go,
which saves a lot of intermediate temporaries and copies in ostringstream. we
can also avoid copying the concatenated string again by directly allocating it
in GC memory and moving ownership of the concatenated string into the target
value.
saves about 2% on system eval.
before:
Benchmark 1: nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
Time (mean ± σ): 2.837 s ± 0.031 s [User: 2.562 s, System: 0.191 s]
Range (min … max): 2.796 s … 2.892 s 20 runs
after:
Benchmark 1: nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
Time (mean ± σ): 2.790 s ± 0.035 s [User: 2.532 s, System: 0.187 s]
Range (min … max): 2.722 s … 2.836 s 20 runs
Previously you had to remember to call value->attrs->sort() after
populating value->attrs. Now there is a BindingsBuilder helper that
wraps Bindings and ensures that sort() is called before you can use
it.
calling GC_malloc for each value is significantly more expensive than
allocating a bunch of values at once with GC_malloc_many. "a bunch" here
is a GC block size, ie 16KiB or less.
this gives a 1.5% performance boost when evaluating our nixos system.
tested with
nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
# on master
Time (mean ± σ): 3.335 s ± 0.007 s [User: 2.774 s, System: 0.293 s]
Range (min … max): 3.315 s … 3.347 s 50 runs
# with this change
Time (mean ± σ): 3.288 s ± 0.006 s [User: 2.728 s, System: 0.292 s]
Range (min … max): 3.274 s … 3.307 s 50 runs
If we’re in pure eval mode, then tell that in the error message rather
than (wrongly) speaking about restricted mode.
Fix https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/5611
This is not really useful on its own, but it does recover the
'infinite recursion' error message for '{ __functor = x: x; } 1', and
is more efficient in conjunction with #3718.
Fixes#5515.
We now parse function applications as a vector of arguments rather
than as a chain of binary applications, e.g. 'substring 1 2 "foo"' is
parsed as
ExprCall { .fun = <substring>, .args = [ <1>, <2>, <"foo"> ] }
rather than
ExprApp (ExprApp (ExprApp <substring> <1>) <2>) <"foo">
This allows primops to be called immediately (if enough arguments are
supplied) without having to allocate intermediate tPrimOpApp values.
On
$ nix-instantiate --dry-run '<nixpkgs/nixos/release-combined.nix>' -A nixos.tests.simple.x86_64-linux
this gives a substantial performance improvement:
user CPU time: median = 0.9209 mean = 0.9218 stddev = 0.0073 min = 0.9086 max = 0.9340 [rejected, p=0.00000, Δ=-0.21433±0.00677]
elapsed time: median = 1.0585 mean = 1.0584 stddev = 0.0024 min = 1.0523 max = 1.0623 [rejected, p=0.00000, Δ=-0.20594±0.00236]
because it reduces the number of tPrimOpApp allocations from 551990 to
42534 (i.e. only small minority of primop calls are partially
applied) which in turn reduces time spent in the garbage collector.
Rather than having them plain strings scattered through the whole
codebase, create an enum containing all the known experimental features.
This means that
- Nix can now `warn` when an unkwown experimental feature is passed
(making it much nicer to spot typos and spot deprecated features)
- It’s now easy to remove a feature altogether (once the feature isn’t
experimental anymore or is dropped) by just removing the field for the
enum and letting the compiler point us to all the now invalid usages
of it.
The boolean is only used to determine if the formals are set to a
non-null pointer in all our cases. We can get rid of that allocation and
instead just compare the pointer value with NULL. Saving up to
sizeof(bool) + platform specific alignment per ExprLambda instace.
Probably not a lot of memory but perhaps a few kilobyte with nixpkgs?
This also gets rid of a potential issue with dereferencing formals based on
the value of the boolean that didn't have to be aligned with the formals
pointer but was in all our cases.
I found it somewhat confusing to have an error like
error: attribute 'getFlake' missing
if the required experimental-feature (`flakes`) is not enabled. Instead,
I'd expect Nix to throw an error just like it's the case when using e.g. `nix
flake` without `flakes` being enabled.
With this change, the error looks like this:
$ nix-instantiate -E 'builtins.getFlake "nixpkgs"'
error: Cannot call 'builtins.getFlake' because experimental Nix feature 'flakes' is disabled. You can enable it via '--extra-experimental-features flakes'.
at «string»:1:1:
1| builtins.getFlake "nixpkgs"
| ^
I didn't use `settings.requireExperimentalFeature` here on purpose
because this doesn't contain a position. Also, it doesn't seem as if we
need to catch the error and check for the missing feature here since
this already happens at evaluation time.
Previously, type or coercion errors for string interpolation, path
interpolation, and plus expressions were always reported at the
beginning of the outer expression. This leads to confusing evaluation
error messages making it hard to accurately diagnose and then fix the
error.
For example, errors were reported as follows.
```
cannot coerce an integer to a string
1| let foo = 7; in "bar" + foo
| ^
cannot add a string to an integer
1| let foo = "bar"; in 4 + foo
| ^
cannot coerce an integer to a string
1| let foo = 7; in "x${foo}"
| ^
```
This commit changes the ExprConcatStrings expression vector to store a
sequence of expressions *and* their expansion locations so that error
locations can be reported accurately. For interpolation, the error is
reported at the beginning of the entire `${foo}`, not at the beginning
of `foo` because I thought this was slightly clearer. The previous
errors are now reported as:
```
cannot coerce an integer to a string
1| let foo = 7; in "bar" + foo
| ^
cannot add a string to an integer
1| let foo = "bar"; in 4 + foo
| ^
cannot coerce an integer to a string
1| let foo = 7; in "x${foo}"
| ^
```
The error is reported at this kind of precise location even for
multi-line indented strings.
This probably helps with at least some of the cases mentioned in #561
This fixes a class of crashes and introduces ptr<T> to make the
code robust against this failure mode going forward.
Thanks regnat for the idea of a ref<T> without overhead!
Closes#4895Closes#4893Closes#5127Closes#5113
When working on some more complex Nix code, there are sometimes rather
unhelpful or misleading error messages, especially if coerce-errors are
thrown.
This patch is a first steps towards improving that. I'm happy to file
more changes after that, but I'd like to gather some feedback first.
To summarize, this patch does the following things:
* Attrsets (a.k.a. `Bindings` in `libexpr`) now have a `Pos`. This is
helpful e.g. to identify which attribute-set in `listToAttrs` is
invalid.
* The `Value`-struct has a new method named `determinePos` which tries
to guess the position of a value and falls back to a default if that's
not possible.
This can be used to provide better messages if a coercion fails.
* The new `determinePos`-API is used by `builtins.concatMap` now. With
that change, Nix shows the exact position in the error where a wrong
value was returned by the lambda.
To make sure it's still obvious that `concatMap` is the problem,
another stack-frame was added.
* The changes described above can be added to every other `primop`, but
first I'd like to get some feedback about the overall approach.
Changes:
* The divider lines are gone. These were in practice a bit confusing,
in particular with --show-trace or --keep-going, since then there
were multiple lines, suggesting a start/end which wasn't the case.
* Instead, multi-line error messages are now indented to align with
the prefix (e.g. "error: ").
* The 'description' field is gone since we weren't really using it.
* 'hint' is renamed to 'msg' since it really wasn't a hint.
* The error is now printed *before* the location info.
* The 'name' field is no longer printed since most of the time it
wasn't very useful since it was just the name of the exception (like
EvalError). Ideally in the future this would be a unique, easily
googleable error ID (like rustc).
* "trace:" is now just "…". This assumes error contexts start with
something like "while doing X".
Example before:
error: --- AssertionError ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
assertion 'false' failed
----------------------------------------------------- show-trace -----------------------------------------------------
trace: while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
Example after:
error: assertion 'false' failed
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
… while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
