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Rework library interface #2582

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@bakaq bakaq commented Sep 30, 2024

This completely reworks the library interface, moving in the direction of #2490. This already has #![deny(missing_docs)], but I just did very basic documentation. This isn't intended to be a final version, and we probably want to adjust it a little1, especially in the naming. For now this is mostly about the interface and I haven't properly implemented a lot of them or even migrated the old tests yet, but I plan to do that soon. After we decide a good direction for the APIs, implement most of it and migrate the tests, we can write proper proper documentation, new tests and examples2.

I have a rendered version of the cargo doc output from this PR here so that it's easier to review the interface. I will try to keep it updated with the tip of this branch.

Some things I want to bring attention to:

  • PrologTerm3 (the old Value) uses OrderedFloat<f64>, Integer and Rational, which are from the ordered_float and dashu crates. This is a semver hazard, because we would need a breaking change every time one of those crates has a breaking change. It's specially hazardous because neither of them are 1.0 yet, which tends to mean "unstable" in the Rust ecosystem. I don't think this is too bad actually, as the cadence of major versions of both of those crates seem to be very slow. I also think it wouldn't be very wise to wrap lot of dashu in Scryer Prolog to try to avoid this. On the other hand, I don't think OrderedFloat<f64> is necessary in PrologTerm. Using f64 instead would mean that we lose Eq, which isn't that bad.
  • StreamConfig and MachineConfig are now opaque and (kind of) use the builder pattern, which is a very common thing in the Rust ecosystem and means we can freely change the internal representation of these types (which I plan to do a lot in the future to enable some really cool stuff in Wasm).
  • I don't have a CompleteAnswer type. I don't really see a benefit of using it instead of just collecting QueryState into a Vec<LeafAnswer> or something like that. Please give any examples if you think of any.

The following are some things I think I'm already going to do. If someone disagrees with any of them, please let me know!

  • I think that Machine::new_lib() should just be a Default implementation. Maybe also get rid of Machine::new() in favor of something like MachineConfig::build() to get the full benefits of the builder pattern.
  • Change MachineConfig::with_toplevel() to accept non-static strings, so that people can use a runtime generated toplevel without having to leak. This would need some deep changes probably, so I'm not sure if it's very simple to do.

@mthom @Skgland @triska @lucksus I will appreciate if you take a look at this.

Footnotes

  1. For example, I would really like if we leave space in the API for "lazy" APIs that don't need to allocate. They would be specially useful for the C API.

  2. It will also unblock ISSUE-2464: exposing scryer prolog functionality in libscryer_prolog.so for client library consumption #2465, because I think the interface will be mostly stable after that so there will not be many conflicts.

  3. I wanted to call it Term, but because Term already exists in the parser and we have wildcard imports everywhere there are a lot of conflicts that seem kind of complicated to fix. It seems that the rebis-dev branch gets rid of that type, so that's kind of exciting.

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bakaq commented Oct 12, 2024

  • Migrated the tests (except the "integration tests", which I already did in a34996a and will reintegrate into this branch soon), and benches, so the CI passes now.
  • Renamed MachineConfig to MachineBuilder and removed Machine::new() and similar to solidify the builder pattern. The builder pattern will make it very smooth to add arbitrary additional configuration in the future.
  • Removed some "extra" helper methods to make the API surface for this MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as small as possible. I believe the current interface is enough for almost all use cases, and future improvements would be to add helper methods for common patterns (like just checking if a query succeeds).

As always, documentation current to the tip of this branch is available here.

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bakaq commented Oct 13, 2024

Actually, the integration tests depend on JSON serialization. Should I integrate #2493 into this PR? I think it would be a better idea to merge this first and then rebase that one onto master, because I think JSON serialization still needs a lot of discussion that is mostly disconnected to the discussion that this PR needs.

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