The def rules are now compiled to byte code by the compiler and then to
native code by the JIT compiler in the runtime. Not all constructions
are implemented yet. The partial implementation is now in the repository
but it is not activated by default since this requires changes in the
PGF format. I will enable it only after it is complete.
PGF exports the public, stable API.
PGF.Internal exports additional things needed in the GF compiler & shell,
including the nonstardard version of Data.Binary.
When running a command like
gf -make L_1.gf ... L_n.gf
gf now avoids recreating the target PGF file if it already exists and is
up-to-date.
gf still reads all required .gfo files, so significant additional speed
improvements are still possible. This could be done by reading .gfo files
more lazily...
When running a command like
gf -make -name=T L_1.pgf ... L_n.pgf
gf now checks if T.pgf exists and is up-to-date before reading and computing
the union of the L_i.pgf files.
The name (T) of the target PGF file has to be given explicitly for this to work,
since otherwise the name is not known until the union has been computed.
If the functions for reading PGF files and computing the union were lazier,
this would not be necessary...
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%.
Most of the explicit uses of ByteStrings were eliminated by using identS,
identS = identC . BS.pack
which was found in GF.Grammar.CF and moved to GF.Infra.Ident. The function
prefixIdent :: String -> Ident -> Ident
allowed one additional import of ByteString to be eliminated. The functions
isArgIdent :: Ident -> Bool
getArgIndex :: Ident -> Maybe Int
were needed to eliminate explicit pattern matching on Ident from two modules.
