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Neat 0.5.1: Make related_post_gen Fast Hopefully
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@FeepingCreature FeepingCreature released this 01 Jan 22:01
· 108 commits to master since this release
v0.5.1
a31672e

We're not supposed to add optimizations directly for the benchmark. So have Neat 0.5.1, with a whole bunch of generic performance optimizations added for "no particular reason."

But first:

Semi-big language change: &var now requires mut.

You can no longer take the address of any variable not declared mut. This has been an open problem for a long time: the refcounter absolutely relies on mut to tell it if a variable is allowed to change. if you can just take a pointer to a variable and assign to it, that bypasses all protections. Since you can just make (almost) any variable mut this should not present any issues.

This used to be an issue for the refcounter, but as of this release neat will engage in more intense optimization of non-mut variables. As a result, if you somehow manage to mutate a non-mut variable, your changes may straight up not be visible in other parts of the code.

I'll take this opportunity to draw your attention to a gaping hole in the language. You can call struct methods on variables that are not mut. These methods can then mutate variables in the struct. If you do this, you will basically break everything. The long-term fix to this is to annotate methods with mut and only allow mut methods to mutate this. The short-term fix is to be careful with what methods you call.

__moveEmplace, __copyEmplace

These are mainly useful for macro writers. __moveEmplace(source, dest) will write source into dest without any refcounting. __copyEmplace(source, dest) will write a copy of source into dest. Note that neither of them refcount dest, so they should be used when initializing uninitialized variables and arrays. Use __copyEmplace if you wish to access source after the call; with __moveEmplace, this is illegitimate code.

Loop speedups

for (value in array) type loops no longer produce pointless bounds checks. This is, I want to emphasize again, a fully generic optimization that has absolutely nothing to do with any particular benchmark that Neat did absolutely terribly on.

And some small stuff

  • Fix LLVM backend spacer alignment.
  • Implement a %= b;.
  • Add std.algorithm.zip.
  • Vectors are now index assignable.
  • Add ArraySource, ArraySink
  • Add Time.year, month, etc. Add Time.monotonic for benchmarking.
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