This commit removes the `field_call_bind` and `field_call_bind_named` ZIR
instructions, replacing them with a `field_call` instruction which does the bind
and call in one.
`field_call_bind` is an unfortunate instruction. It's tied into one very
specific usage pattern - its result can only be used as a callee. This means
that it creates a value of a "pseudo-type" of sorts, `bound_fn` - this type used
to exist in Zig, but now we just hide it from the user and have AstGen ensure
it's only used in one way. This is quite silly - `Type` and `Value` should, as
much as possible, reflect real Zig types and values.
It makes sense to instead encode the `a.b()` syntax as its own ZIR instruction,
so that's what we do here. This commit introduces a new instruction,
`field_call`. It's like `call`, but rather than a callee ref, it contains a ref
to the object pointer (`&a` in `a.b()`) and the string field name (`b`). This
eliminates `bound_fn` from the language, and slightly decreases the size of
generated ZIR - stats below.
This commit does remove a few usages which used to be allowed:
- `@field(a, "b")()`
- `@call(.auto, a.b, .{})`
- `@call(.auto, @field(a, "b"), .{})`
These forms used to work just like `a.b()`, but are no longer allowed. I believe
this is the correct choice for a few reasons:
- `a.b()` is a purely *syntactic* form; for instance, `(a.b)()` is not valid.
This means it is *not* inconsistent to not allow it in these cases; the
special case here isn't "a field access as a callee", but rather this exact
syntactic form.
- The second argument to `@call` looks much more visually distinct from the
callee in standard call syntax. To me, this makes it seem strange for that
argument to not work like a normal expression in this context.
- A more practical argument: it's confusing! `@field` and `@call` are used in
very different contexts to standard function calls: the former normally hints
at some comptime machinery, and the latter that you want more precise control
over parts of a function call. In these contexts, you don't want implicit
arguments adding extra confusion: you want to be very explicit about what
you're doing.
Lastly, some stats. I mentioned before that this change slightly reduces the
size of ZIR - this is due to two instructions (`field_call_bind` then `call`)
being replaced with one (`field_call`). Here are some numbers:
+--------------+----------+----------+--------+
| File | Before | After | Change |
+--------------+----------+----------+--------+
| Sema.zig | 4.72M | 4.53M | -4% |
| AstGen.zig | 1.52M | 1.48M | -3% |
| hash_map.zig | 283.9K | 276.2K | -3% |
| math.zig | 312.6K | 305.3K | -2% |
+--------------+----------+----------+--------+
This will do zig run on the code and expect exit code 0.
// run
Incremental Compilation
Make multiple files that have ".", and then an integer, before the ".zig"
extension, like this:
hello.0.zig
hello.1.zig
hello.2.zig
Each file can be a different kind of test, such as expecting compile errors,
or expecting to be run and exit(0). The test harness will use these to simulate
incremental compilation.
At the time of writing there is no way to specify multiple files being changed
as part of an update.
Subdirectories
Subdirectories do not have any semantic meaning but they can be used for
organization since the test harness will recurse into them. The full directory
path will be prepended as a prefix on the test case name.
Limiting which Backends and Targets are Tested
// run
// backend=stage2,llvm
// target=x86_64-linux,x86_64-macos
Possible backends are:
stage1: equivalent to -fstage1.
stage2: equivalent to passing -fno-stage1 -fno-LLVM.