On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 5:59 PM, Trevor Vaughan <[email protected]>wrote:

> Henrik,
>
> All of this looks great to me. However, I was asked by someone recently if
> the language had the concept of a private class scope.
>
>
Ask and ye shall find: https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-523

We are planning on reserving the private keyword in puppet 4 and
implementing private variables and classes in the puppet 4 series.


> We're seeing more patterns in the wild where people are creating classes
> that are only meant to be used internally to the class and not exposed to
> the rest of the world.
>
> Is there some way that the new scoping system could account for private
> classes?
>
> The best we could come up with right now is the idea of having a 'private'
> directory just to make it clear that they are not meant for public
> consumption but a 'private' keyword would be great so that the language
> itself could enforce the restriction.
>
> Thanks, and looking forward to the performance gains (but a bit worried
> about my custom types that use cross-resource variables).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Trevor
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 8:19 PM, Henrik Lindberg <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> we are just started to get more concrete on how to implement things for
>> 4x and breaking it down into actionable items. If you have looked in Jira,
>> there are currently 5 big issues in the epic "Biff the Catalog Builder" [1]
>> - which is the goal (a new, better performing catalog builder (what is
>> currently known as the "compiler") where we can fix many known issues that
>> today are just to hard to implement.
>>
>> This time, I want to talk about the implementation of Scope, which is
>> part of "(PUP-1832) Implement the Puppet 4.0 Runtime" [2].
>>
>> Currently scope has many responsibilities (too many):
>>
>> * it is classic computer language scope (what is visible "here")
>> * for a class it also represents one aspect of "an instance of a class"
>>   (the attributes of the class are variables in that scope).
>> * Inheritance is achieved by looking up and continuing the search for a
>>   variable in another "scope".
>>
>> Coming up with a new implementation is important to make scope perform
>> well. Thus it is important to know:
>>
>> - write vs read ratio
>> - unqualified vs. qualified lookup (i.e. reading $a:.b::x from within
>> $a::b vs from other scopes)
>> - typical nesting levels of named scopes
>>
>> We also have to decide if any of the relative name-space functionality
>> should remain (i.e. reference to x::y is relative to potentially a series of
>> other name spaces ("dynamic scoping"), or if it is always a global
>> reference when it is qualified.
>>
>> The implementation idea we have in mind is that there is one global scope
>> where all "qualified variables" are found/can be resolved, and that all
>> other variables are in local scopes that nest. (Local scopes include
>> ephemeral scopes for match variables).
>>
>> Given the numbers from measuring the read ratio, we (sort of already
>> know, but still need to measure) need a fast route from any scope to the
>> global - we know that a qualified variable is never resolved by any local
>> scope so we can go straight to the global scope. (This way
>> we do not have to traverse the chain up to the "parent most" scope (the
>> global one). Local scopes are always local, there is no way to address the
>> local variables from some other non-nested scope - essentially how the
>> regular CPU stack works, or how variables in a language like C work).
>>
>> i.e. we have something like this in Scope
>>
>> Scope
>>   attr_reader :global_scope
>>   attr_reader :parent_scope
>>   # ...
>> end
>>
>>
>> The global scope keeps an index designed to be as fast as possible to
>> resolve a qualified name to a value. The design of this index depends on
>> the frequency of different types of lookup. If all qualified lookups are
>> absolute it would simply be a hash of all absolute names to values (it
>> really cannot be faster than that).
>>
>> The logic for lookup then becomes:
>> - for un-qualified name, search up the parent chain (this chain does not
>> reach the global scope), if still unresolved, look in global scope.
>> - for qualified name, look up in global scope directly
>>
>> If we need to also consider relative namespaces (i.e. x::y could mean
>> z::x::y, or a::b::c::x::y etc. we can then either probe in turn with each
>> name (which is fine if the number of things to probe is low), or provide a
>> reverse index where y is first looked up to get the next level of names,
>> etc. (the idea being that this requires fewer operations to find the right
>> one).
>>
>> IF we can completely remove the notion of relative namespacing we gain
>> performance!
>>
>> The global scope, in addition to having the qualified names also needs to
>> separate the names by "kind" since we can have the same name for different
>> "kinds". We can now keep keep all named things in the global scope -
>> functions, types, variables, etc. Global scope and loading are
>> associated (more about loading in a later post) but it is worth noting
>> that it may be of value to be able to record that there has already been an
>> attempt of loading a particular name, and that there was nothing there to
>> load...
>>
>> We are going to need the following kinds of scopes:
>>
>> * Global Scope - holding map from kind, to fully qualified name to value
>> * Local Scope - holding variables that shadow parent scope
>> * Ephemeral / Match Scope (read only) - when a match is made
>> * Class Scope - the topmost scope for a class - needed because variable
>> lookup in it, and its nested scope needs to lookup all class attributes
>> (and defined them) via reading/setting variables.
>> * Resource Scope - the topmost scope for a user defined resource type -
>> needed because its parameters are available as read only variables.
>>
>> The resource scope simply makes the resource parameters available. It
>> behaves as a local scope otherwise.
>>
>> The class scope looks up unqualified variables in the class itself, if
>> not found there, it continues up the parent chain of scopes. If the class
>> inherits from another, then, the parent scope is one that represents its
>> super class.
>>
>> In class scope, setting a variable also means that it is set in global
>> scope with the fully qualified name. This is where the logic around class
>> private variables comes in. If it is private, it cannot be accessed from
>> the outside (i.e. with a qualified name), and thus it
>> is only set in the class / class-scope. This in turn brings up the issue
>> of also supporting "protected" variables; only visible from within the
>> class logic, and the logic in sub classes, and if subclasses should see
>> private inherited variables or not (probably not).
>>
>> The above could probably do with some picture :-)
>>
>> Now, some questions...
>>
>> - Are there any particular performance concerns you think we need to be
>> aware of?
>> - Do you have concerns about things we missed? Something important scope
>> needs to do?
>> - Do you have metrics from your environment? (number of lookups of
>> various kinds, etc)
>> - What is your reaction to getting rid of dynamic/relative name
>> resolution? (Breakage vs. sanity...)
>>
>> Regards
>> - henrik
>>
>> Links
>> ---
>>
>> [1]: https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-1789
>> [2]: https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-1832
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Trevor Vaughan
> Vice President, Onyx Point, Inc
> (410) 541-6699
> [email protected]
>
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