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digitalmars.D - D support in Thrift needs your reviews!

reply "David Nadlinger" <see klickverbot.at> writes:
As you might remember, I worked on adding D support to Apache 
Thrift [1] during Google Summer of Code 2011. A few months (and 
DMD releases) down the road, the patch was finally submitted to 
Thrift upstream [2], with the test suite passing on all of 
Windows, Linux and OS X.

The problem now is that while there is definitely interest in 
using D with Thrift, the upstream team is (unsurprisingly, 
perhaps) lacking people who know D well enough to review the 
almost 24k LOC patch. Thus, the patch has been sitting in the 
Apache JIRA for almost two months now.

So, if you are interested in Thrift or already have some 
experience with it, it'd be great if you could have a look at the 
code and let me (and the Thrift issue tracker, of course), know 
what you think. You should be able to find anything needed from 
the ticket [2], let me know if something is missing.

———
What the library doesn't have (yet):
  -  safe-ty annotations (pure doesn't apply to most of the code): 
I tried to add them a while back, but hit some unpleasant 
compiler bugs.

  - Compile-time Thrift IDL parsing: While most of the codegen is 
done at D compile time anyway, having the interface file parser 
in CTFE as well wasn't really feasible when GSoC started (before 
Don's rewrite), and integration with the main Thrift compiler 
would have been required in any case. Now, a CTFE implementation 
might be a nice use case of one of the CTFE parsing libraries, 
though (the current code generator is only 700 lines of C++, plus 
parser), if you want to tackle this, let me know.

  - A HashSet implementation in Phobos it could generate code 
against; currently, a void[0]-AA-based hack is used. I've been 
meaning to look into adding something to std.container for ages 
now, but with me being swamped in work and the container design 
being »in flux« (e.g. allocators)…

  - While I implemented a feature to generate Thrift IDL from 
existing D structs and interfaces at compile time (now that is 
cool), which can do a round-trip for all Thrift-generated code, 
it probably breaks in the face of real-world D code – please 
use it, break it, and ideally fix it. ;)

  – There are lots of cool ideas for D-specific features which 
could be added, for example a Thrift server which maps RPC 
requests to std.concurrency messages, etc. So far, I mostly 
concentrated on providing the parts which Thrift users expect to 
be there, i.e. which the C++ and Java implementations also offer. 
This also involves a slightly non-idiomatic design in some 
places, which is unfortunate, but Thrift generally strives to 
find a good balance between offering a »native« feel in each 
target language and cross-language consistency.
———

Thanks,
David


[1] http://thrift.apache.org/
[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-1500
Mar 11 2012
next sibling parent reply bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
David Nadlinger:


 What the library doesn't have (yet):
   -  safe-ty annotations (pure doesn't apply to most of the code): 
 I tried to add them a while back, but hit some unpleasant 
 compiler bugs.


Are they in Bugzilla already?

Bye,
bearophile
Mar 11 2012
parent "David Nadlinger" <see klickverbot.at> writes:
On Sunday, 11 March 2012 at 21:55:54 UTC, bearophile wrote:

 David Nadlinger:

 What the library doesn't have (yet):
   -  safe-ty annotations (pure doesn't apply to most of the 
 code): I tried to add them a while back, but hit some 
 unpleasant compiler bugs.


 Are they in Bugzilla already?


Some findings include issue 7049–7052, but what led me to stop 
work on it was an instance related to interfaces where I couldn't 
figure out what was going on. Trying to add it should be easy for 
anyone who is interested, though, just put a » safe:« at the 
top of each file and look where the test suite build breaks.

David
Mar 11 2012
prev sibling parent reply "Martin Nowak" <dawg dawgfoto.de> writes:
 So, if you are interested in Thrift or already have some experience wi=


th  =


 it, it'd be great if you could have a look at the code and let me (and=


  =


 the Thrift issue tracker, of course), know what you think. You should =


be  =


 able to find anything needed from the ticket [2], let me know if  =



 something is missing.


I did recently tried it out because I wanted to test some async Fiber  =

kqueue stuff.
It did fail to compile though because of conflicting selective imports.
You probably want to avoid those until the remaining issues are sorted o=
ut.


   - Compile-time Thrift IDL parsing:


I probably forgot to lex floating point literals.
https://gist.github.com/2019921#gistcomment-90654



   - A HashSet implementation in Phobos it could generate code against;=


  =


 currently, a void[0]-AA-based hack is used. I've been meaning to look =


 =


 into adding something to std.container for ages now, but with me being=


  =


 swamped in work and the container design being =C2=BBin flux=C2=AB (e.=


g.  =


 allocators)=E2=80=A6


Yup, at some point we should stick a not yet ready allocator design
into std.experimental before it inhibits even more development.

The void[0][Key] is a good trick, I always used empty structs.
Mar 11 2012
parent "David Nadlinger" <see klickverbot.at> writes:
On Monday, 12 March 2012 at 05:44:10 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:

 I did recently tried it out because I wanted to test some async 
 Fiber kqueue stuff.
 It did fail to compile though because of conflicting selective 
 imports.
 You probably want to avoid those until the remaining issues are 
 sorted out.


Ouch, no idea how that happened – before the 2.058 release, I 
tested it regularly against the old import implementation, my own 
fix for bug 314, the then-trunk including Christian's 314 fixes, 
and I even tested most revisions during the »let's back this out 
shortly before the release« fiasko, but I must have somehow 
missed the actual release when doing so.

In any case, I pushed a fix to the Thrift JIRA and the GitHub 
repo [1], but was only able to test on OS X, so let me know if it 
still breaks for you.



  - Compile-time Thrift IDL parsing:


 I probably forgot to lex floating point literals.
 https://gist.github.com/2019921#gistcomment-90654


Nice! I hope I'll miraculously find myself with a free afternoon 
during the next week or so, can't wait to play around with it. 
Also, I'm thinking about rewriting the codegen completely in CTFE 
(i.e. producing a big string to be mixed in instead of using 
templates with string mixins only where required), because this 
would allow running the generator separately (and caching the 
output in a regular .d file) for faster build times…



  - A HashSet implementation in Phobos it could generate code 
 against; currently, a void[0]-AA-based hack is used. I've been 
 meaning to look into adding something to std.container for 
 ages now, but with me being swamped in work and the container 
 design being »in flux« (e.g. allocators)…


 Yup, at some point we should stick a not yet ready allocator 
 design
 into std.experimental before it inhibits even more development.


Andrei? ;)



 The void[0][Key] is a good trick, I always used empty structs.


I expose a (minimalistic) thrift.util.HashSet wrapper, though, to 
avoid too much confusion on the user side (and besides, an empty 
struct is probably cleaner anyway).


David


[1] https://github.com/klickverbot/thrift
Mar 12 2012