On my laptop these changes speed up the full build of the RGL and example
grammars with 'cabal build' from ~95s to ~43s and the zero build from ~18s
to ~5s.
The main change is the introduction of the module GF.CompileInParallel that
replaces GF.Compile and the function GF.Compile.ReadFiles.getAllFiles. At
present, it is activated with the new -j flag, and it is only used when
combined with --make or --batch. In addition, to get parallel computations,
you need to add GHC run-time flags, e.g., +RTS -N -A20M -RTS, to the command
line.
The Setup.hs script has been modified to pass the appropriate flags to GF
for parallel compilation when compiling the RGL and example grammars, but you
need a recent version of Cabal for this to work (probably >=1.20).
Some additonal refactoring were made during this work. A new monad is used to
avoid warnings/error messages from different modules to be intertwined when
compiling in parallel, so some functios that were hardiwred to the IO or IOE
monads have been lifted to work in arbitrary monads that are instances in
the appropriate classes.
In particular, the function compileOne has been moved to the new module
GF.CompileOne and its type has been changed from
compileOne :: ... -> CompileEnv -> FilePath -> IOE CompileEnv
to
compileOne :: ... -> SourceGrammar -> FilePath -> IOE OneCompiledModule
making it more suitable for use in a parallel compiler.
1. The default encoding is changed from Latin-1 to UTF-8.
2. Alternate encodings should be specified as "--# -coding=enc", the old
"flags coding=enc" declarations have no effect but are still checked for
consistency.
3. A transitional warning is generated for files that contain non-ASCII
characters without specifying a character encoding:
"Warning: default encoding has changed from Latin-1 to UTF-8"
4. Conversion to Unicode is now done *before* lexing. This makes it possible
to allow arbitrary Unicode characters in identifiers. But identifiers are
still stored as ByteStrings, so they are limited to Latin-1 characters
for now.
5. Lexer.hs is no longer part of the repository. We now generate the lexer
from Lexer.x with alex>=3. Some workarounds for bugs in alex-3.0 were
needed. These bugs might already be fixed in newer versions of alex, but
we should be compatible with what is shipped in the Haskell Platform.
+ Eliminated vairous ad-hoc coersion functions between specific monads
(IO, Err, IOE, Check) in favor of more general lifting functions
(liftIO, liftErr).
+ Generalized many basic monadic operations from specific monads to
arbitrary monads in the appropriate class (MonadIO and/or ErrorMonad),
thereby completely eliminating the need for lifting functions in lots
of places.
This can be considered a small step forward towards a cleaner
compiler API and more malleable compiler code in general.
+ References to modules under src/compiler have been eliminated from the PGF
library (under src/runtime/haskell). Only two functions had to be moved (from
GF.Data.Utilities to PGF.Utilities) to make this possible, other apparent
dependencies turned out to be vacuous.
+ In gf.cabal, the GF executable no longer directly depends on the PGF library
source directory, but only on the exposed library modules. This means that
there is less duplication in gf.cabal and that the 30 modules in the
PGF library will no longer be compiled twice while building GF.
To make this possible, additional PGF library modules have been exposed, even
though they should probably be considered for internal use only. They could
be collected in a PGF.Internal module, or marked as "unstable", to make
this explicit.
+ Also, by using the -fwarn-unused-imports flag, ~220 redundant imports were
found and removed, reducing the total number of imports by ~15%.
