Given Rust's current lack of support for tail calls, we cannot avoid
using `async` for builtins. This is the only way to avoid
overflowing the cpu stack when we have arbitrarily deep
builtin/interpreted/builtin/interpreted/... "sandwiches"
There are only five `async fn` functions which are not builtins
(some come in multiple "flavors"):
- add_values
- resolve_with
- force, final_deep_force
- nix_eq, nix_cmp_eq
- coerce_to_string
These can be written iteratively rather than recursively (and in
fact nix_eq used to be written that way!). I volunteer to rewrite
them. If written iteratively they would no longer need to be
`async`.
There are two motivations for limiting our reliance on `async` to
only the situation (builtins) where we have no other choice:
1. Performance.
We don't really have any good measurement of the performance hit
that the Box<dyn Future>s impose on us. Right now all of our
large (nixpkgs-eval) tests are swamped by the cost of other
things (e.g. fork()ing `nix-store`) so we can't really measure
it. Builtins tend to be expensive operations anyways
(regexp-matching, sorting, etc) that are likely to already cost
more than the `async` overhead.
2. Preserving the ability to switch to `musttail` calls.
Clang/LLVM recently got `musttail` (mandatory-elimination tail
calls). Rust has refused to add this mainly because WASM doesn't
support, but WASM `tail_call` has been implemented and was
recently moved to phase 4 (standardization). It is very likely
that Rust will get tail calls sometime in the next year; if it
does, we won't need async anymore. In the meantime, I'd like to
avoid adding any further reliance on `async` in places where it
wouldn't be straightforward to replace it with a tail call.
https://reviews.llvm.org/D99517https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/pull/157
https: //github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/2691#issuecomment-1462152908
Change-Id: Id15945d5a92bf52c16d93456e3437f91d93bdc57
Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/8290
Reviewed-by: tazjin <tazjin@tvl.su>
Tested-by: BuildkiteCI
Autosubmit: Adam Joseph <adam@westernsemico.com>
1e80b9ea8b