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2021-05-30THE GREAT CEEIFICATION EVENTRobin Haberkorn1-350/+0
This is a total conversion of SciTECO to plain C (GNU C11). The chance was taken to improve a lot of internal datastructures, fix fundamental bugs and lay the foundations of future features. The GTK user interface is now in an useable state! All changes have been squashed together. The language itself has almost not changed at all, except for: * Detection of string terminators (usually Escape) now takes the string building characters into account. A string is only terminated outside of string building characters. In other words, you can now for instance write I^EQ[Hello$world]$ This removes one of the last bits of shellisms which is out of place in SciTECO where no tokenization/lexing is performed. Consequently, the current termination character can also be escaped using ^Q/^R. This is used by auto completions to make sure that strings are inserted verbatim and without unwanted sideeffects. * All strings can now safely contain null-characters (see also: 8-bit cleanliness). The null-character itself (^@) is not (yet) a valid SciTECO command, though. An incomplete list of changes: * We got rid of the BSD headers for RB trees and lists/queues. The problem with them was that they used a form of metaprogramming only to gain a bit of type safety. It also resulted in less readble code. This was a C++ desease. The new code avoids metaprogramming only to gain type safety. The BSD tree.h has been replaced by rb3ptr by Jens Stimpfle (https://github.com/jstimpfle/rb3ptr). This implementation is also more memory efficient than BSD's. The BSD list.h and queue.h has been replaced with a custom src/list.h. * Fixed crashes, performance issues and compatibility issues with the Gtk 3 User Interface. It is now more or less ready for general use. The GDK lock is no longer used to avoid using deprecated functions. On the downside, the new implementation (driving the Gtk event loop stepwise) is even slower than the old one. A few glitches remain (see TODO), but it is hoped that they will be resolved by the Scintilla update which will be performed soon. * A lot of program units have been split up, so they are shorter and easier to maintain: core-commands.c, qreg-commands.c, goto-commands.c, file-utils.h. * Parser states are simply structs of callbacks now. They still use a kind of polymorphy using a preprocessor trick. TECO_DEFINE_STATE() takes an initializer list that will be merged with the default list of field initializers. To "subclass" states, you can simply define new macros that add initializers to existing macros. * Parsers no longer have a "transitions" table but the input_cb() may use switch-case statements. There are also teco_machine_main_transition_t now which can be used to implement simple transitions. Additionally, you can specify functions to execute during transitions. This largely avoids long switch-case-statements. * Parsers are embeddable/reusable now, at least in parse-only mode. This does not currently bring any advantages but may later be used to write a Scintilla lexer for TECO syntax highlighting. Once parsers are fully embeddable, it will also be possible to run TECO macros in a kind of coroutine which would allow them to process string arguments in real time. * undo.[ch] still uses metaprogramming extensively but via the C preprocessor of course. On the downside, most undo token generators must be initiated explicitly (theoretically we could have used embedded functions / trampolines to instantiate automatically but this has turned out to be dangereous). There is a TECO_DEFINE_UNDO_CALL() to generate closures for arbitrary functions now (ie. to call an arbitrary function at undo-time). This simplified a lot of code and is much shorter than manually pushing undo tokens in many cases. * Instead of the ridiculous C++ Curiously Recurring Template Pattern to achieve static polymorphy for user interface implementations, we now simply declare all functions to implement in interface.h and link in the implementations. This is possible since we no longer hace to define interface subclasses (all state is static variables in the interface's *.c files). * Headers are now significantly shorter than in C++ since we can often hide more of our "class" implementations. * Memory counting is based on dlmalloc for most platforms now. Unfortunately, there is no malloc implementation that provides an efficient constant-time memory counter that is guaranteed to decrease when freeing memory. But since we use a defined malloc implementation now, malloc_usable_size() can be used safely for tracking memory use. malloc() replacement is very tricky on Windows, so we use a poll thread on Windows. This can also be enabled on other supported platforms using --disable-malloc-replacement. All in all, I'm still not pleased with the state of memory limiting. It is a mess. * Error handling uses GError now. This has the advantage that the GError codes can be reused once we support error catching in the SciTECO language. * Added a few more test suite cases. * Haiku is no longer supported as builds are instable and I did not manage to debug them - quite possibly Haiku bugs were responsible. * Glib v2.44 or later are now required. The GTK UI requires Gtk+ v3.12 or later now. The GtkFlowBox fallback and sciteco-wrapper workaround are no longer required. * We now extensively use the GCC/Clang-specific g_auto feature (automatic deallocations when leaving the current code block). * Updated copyright to 2021. SciTECO has been in continuous development, even though there have been no commits since 2018. * Since these changes are so significant, the target release has been set to v2.0. It is planned that beginning with v3.0, the language will be kept stable.
2017-08-24fixed memory leaks and memory measurement leaks by removing -fsized-deallocationRobin Haberkorn1-40/+28
* Array allocations were not properly accounted since the compiler would call the replacement new() which assumes that it would always be called along with the replacement sized-deletion. This is not true for array new[] allocations resulting in a constant increase of memory_usage and unrecoverable situations. This problem however could be fixed in principle by avoiding memory counting for arrays or falling back to malloc_usable_size. * The bigger problem was that some STLs (new_allocator) are broken, calling the non-sized delete for regular new() calls which could in principle be matched by sized-delete. This is also the reason why I had to provide a non-sized delete replacement, which in reality intoduced memory leaks. * Since adding checks for the broken compiler versions or a configure-time check that tries to detect these broken systems seems tedious, I simply removed that optimization. * This means we always have to rely on malloc_usable_size() now for non-SciTECO-object memory measurement. * Perhaps in the future, there should be an option for allowing portable measurement at the cost of memory usage, by prefixing each memory chunk with the chunk size. Maintainers could then decide to optimize their build for "speed" at the cost of memory overhead. * Another solution to this non-ending odyssey might be to introduce our own allocator, replacing malloc(), and allowing our own precise measurements.
2017-04-30define non-sized deallocator and memory counting debuggingRobin Haberkorn1-10/+34
* it turned out to be possible to provoke memory_usage overflows or underruns, resulting in unrecoverable states * a possible reason can be that at least with G++ 5.4.0, the compiler would sometimes call the (default) non-sized delete followed by our custom sized delete/deallocator. * This was true even after compiling Scintilla with -fsized-deallocation. * therefore we provide an empty non-sized delete now. * memory_usage counting can now be debugged by uncommenting DEBUG_MAGIC in memory.cpp. This uses a magic value to detect instrumented allocations being mixed with non-instrumented allocations. * simplified the global sized-deallocation functions (they are identical to the Object-class allocators).
2017-03-08yet another revision of memory limiting: the glibc mallinfo() approach has ↵Robin Haberkorn1-75/+108
been shown to be unacceptably broken, so the fallback implementation has been improved * mallinfo() is not only broken on 64-bit systems but slows things down linearilly to the memory size of the process. E.g. after 500000<%A>, SciTECO will act sluggish! Shutting down afterwards can take minutes... mallinfo() was thus finally discarded as a memory measurement technique. * Evaluating /proc/self/statm? has also been evaluated and discarded because doing this frequently is even slower. * Instead, the fallback implementation has been drastically improved: * If possible use C++14 global sized deallocators, allowing memory measurements across the entire C++ code base with minimal runtime overhead. Since we only depend on C++11, a lengthy Autoconf check had to be introduced. * Use malloc_usable_size() with global non-sized deallocators to measure the approx. memory usage of the entire process (at least the ones done via C++). The cheaper C++11 sized deallocators implemented via SciTECO::Object still have precedence, so this affects Scintilla code only. * With both improvements the test case sciteco -e '<@EU[X^E\a]"^E\a"%a>' is handled sufficiently well now on glibc and performance is much better now. * The jemalloc-specific technique has been removed since it no longer brings any benefits compared to the improved fallback technique. Even the case of using malloc_usable_size() in strict C++ mode is up to 3 times faster. * The new fallback implementation might actually be good enough for Windows as well if some MSVCRT-specific support is added, like using _msize() instead of malloc_usable_size(). This must be tested and benchmarked, so we keep the Windows-specific implementation for the time being.
2017-03-06roll back to the old mallinfo() implementation of memory limiting on Linux ↵Robin Haberkorn1-60/+114
and added a FreeBSD/jemalloc-specific implementation * largely reverts 39cfc573, but leaves in minor and documentation changes. * further experimentation of memory limiting using malloc() wrapping has shown additional problems, like dlsym() calling malloc-functions, further reducing the implementation to glibc-specific means. This means there had been no implementation for FreeBSD and checks would have to rely on undocumented internal implementation details of different libcs, which is not a good thing. * Other problems have been identified, like having to wrap calloc(), guarding against underruns and multi-thread safety had been identified but could be worked around. * A technique by calculating the memory usage as sbrk(0) - &end has been shown to be effective enough, at least on glibc. However even on glibc it has shortcomings since malloc() will somtimes use mmap() for allocations and the technique relies on implementation details of the libc. Furthermore another malloc_trim(0) had to be added to the error recovery in interactive mode, since glibc does not adjust the program break automatically (to avoid syscalls I presume). * On FreeBSD/jemalloc, the sbrk(0) method totally fails because jemalloc exclusively allocates via mmap() -> that solution was discarded as well. * Since all evaluated techniques turn out to be highly platform specific, I reverted to the simple and stable platform-specific mallinfo() API on Linux. * On FreeBSD/jemalloc, it's possible to use mallctl("stats.allocated") for the same purpose - so it works there, too now. It's slower than the other techniques, though. * A lengthy discussion has been added to memory.cpp, so that we do not repeat the previous mistakes.
2017-03-05memory limiting: libc malloc() and realloc() can return NULLRobin Haberkorn1-2/+4
* shouldn't make much of a difference, since we're in deep trouble when they return NULL, but the wrappers should be transparent instead of crashing in malloc_usable_size().
2017-03-05replaced Linux-specific mallinfo()-based memory limiting with a more ↵Robin Haberkorn1-17/+90
portable and faster hack * Works by "hooking" into malloc() and friends and counting the usable heap object sizes with malloc_usable_size(). Thus, it has no memory-overhead. * Will work at least on Linux and (Free)BSD. Other UNIXoid systems may work as well - this is tested by ./configure. * Usually faster than even the fallback implementation since the memory limit is hit earlier. * A similar approach could be tried on Windows (TODO). * A proper memory-limiting counting all malloc()s in the system can make a huge difference as this test case shows: sciteco -e '<@EU[X^E\a]"^E\a"%a>' It will allocate gigabytes before hitting the 500MB memory limit... * Fixed the UNIX-function checks on BSDs.
2017-03-03updated copyright to 2017Robin Haberkorn1-1/+1
2016-11-22partially reversed/fixed-up b7ff56db631: avoid g_slice allocators and ↵Robin Haberkorn1-14/+22
performance issues with memory measurements * Fixed build problems on Windows * g_slice on Windows has been shown to be of little use either and it does not work well with the GetProcessMemoryInfo() measurements. Also, it brings the same problem as on Glibc: Not even command-line termination returns the memory to the OS. Therefore, we don't use g_slice at all and commented on it. * The custom Linux and Windows memory measurement approaches have been shown to be inefficient. As a workaround, scripts disable memory limiting. * A better approach -- but it will only work on Glibc -- might be to hook into malloc(), realloc() and free() globally and use the malloc_usable_size() of a heap object for memory measurements. This will be relatively precise and cheap. * We still need the "Object" base class in order to measure memory usage as a fallback approach.
2016-11-20fixed glib warnings about using g_mem_set_vtable() and revised memory limitingRobin Haberkorn1-0/+168
* we were basing the glib allocators on throwing std::bad_alloc just like the C++ operators. However, this always was unsafe since we were throwing exceptions across plain-C frames (Glib). Also, the memory vtable has been deprecated in Glib, resulting in ugly warnings. * Instead, we now let the C++ new/delete operators work like Glib by basing them on g_malloc/g_slice. This means they will assert and the application will terminate abnormally in case of OOM. OOMs cannot be handled properly anyway, so it is more important to have a good memory limiting mechanism. * Memory limiting has been completely revised. Instead of approximating undo stack sizes using virtual methods (which is unprecise and comes with a performance penalty), we now use a common base class SciTECO::Object to count the memory required by all objects allocated within SciTECO. This is less precise than using global replacement new/deletes which would allow us to control allocations in all C++ code including Scintilla, but they are only supported as of C++14 (GCC 5) and adding compile-time checks would be cumbersome. In any case, we're missing Glib allocations (esp. strings). * As a platform-specific extension, on Linux/glibc we use mallinfo() to count the exact memory usage of the process. On Windows, we use GetProcessMemoryInfo() -- the latter implementation is currently UNTESTED. * We use g_malloc() for new/delete operators when there is malloc_trim() since g_slice does not free heap chunks properly (probably does its own mmap()ing), rendering malloc_trim() ineffective. We've also benchmarked g_slice on Linux/glib (malloc_trim() shouldn't be available elsewhere) and found that it brings no significant performance benefit. On all other platforms, we use g_slice since it is assumed that it at least does not hurt. The new g_slice based allocators should be tested on MSVCRT since I assume that they bring a significant performance benefit on Windows. * Memory limiting does now work in batch mode as well and is still enabled by default. * The old UndoTokenWithSize CRTP hack could be removed. UndoStack operations should be a bit faster now. But on the other hand, there will be an overhead due to repeated memory limit checking on every processed character.