6188cb8e50
This fix doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things, but I
think the story behind it is perhaps curious, as it might point at a
design flaw in the Sema's error reporting API. So, a story:
On lobsters, there's a rather heated discussion on the merits on RAII vs
defer. I don't really like participating in heating discussions, but
also sort of can't stop thinking about this.
My own personal experience with Zig's defer and errdefer is that they
are fiddly to get right consistency --- if a program has a lot of
resource management to do, I _always_ mess up at least one
defer/errdefer. I've found my internal peace by just avoiding
spread-out, "pox" resource management, and instead centralizing resource
ownership under one of the following patterns:
* Either the thing is acquired and released in main
* Or main allocates N instances of thing, and then the rest of the code
explicitly juggles this finite pool of N. Notably, this juggling
typically doesn't involve defer/errdefer at all, as, at this level of
precision, there are no `try`s left, so you only code the happy path
* Or there's some sort of arena thing, where a bunch of resources have a
single owner, the user's don' bother cleaning up their resources, and
instead the owner does it once at the end.
So I wanted to make a lobster.rs comment in the vein of "yeah, if your
program is mostly about resource management, then Zig could be kinda a
pain, but that's friction tells you something: perhaps your program
shouldn't be about resource management, and instead it should be doing
what it is supposed to do?". And, as an evidence for my claim, I wanted
to point out some large body of Zig code which doesn't have a lot of
errdefers.
So, I cracked opened Sema.zig, `ctrl+f` for `defer`, saw whopping 400
something occupancies, and my heart skipped a bit. Looking at the
occurrences, _some_ of them were non-resource-related usages of defer.
But a lot of them were the following pattern:
```zig
const msg = try sema.errMsg(src, "comptime control flow inside runtime block", .{});
errdefer msg.destroy(sema.gpa);
```
This is exactly the thing that I know _I_ can't get right consistently!
So, at this point, I made a prediction that at least one of `errdefer`s
is missing. So, I looked at the first few `const msg = try` and of
course found one without `errdefer`.
I am at 0.8 that, even with this PR applied, the claim will still stand
--- there will be `errdefer` missing. So it feels like some API
re-design is in order, to make sure individual error messages are not
resources.
Could Sema just own all partially-constructed error messages, and, at a
few known safe-points:
* if the control flow is normal, assert that there are no in-progress
error messages
* if we are throwing an error, go and release messages immediately?
I am unlikely to do the actual refactor here, but I think it's worth
highlighting the overall pattern here.
PS: I am only 0.9 sure that what I've found is indeed a bug! I don't
understand the code, I did a dumb text search, so I _could_ have made a
fool of myself here :P
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