Luke Boswell (Feb 16 2025 at 00:03): Luke Boswell (Feb 16 2025 at 00:03):Have we had thoughts about where we want to put the builtin symbols?
This may be something @Sam Mohr has already planned.
I'm thinking of taking a small side quest to build that out a bit.
Luke Boswell (Feb 16 2025 at 00:50):I've been thinking... we could use hardcoded integers that work backwards. So when you lookup an Module.Idx during Can and you're looking for say Str.toUtf8 you might get the hardcoded id. e.g. Module.Idx(Str) = maxU32 - 1 = 4_294_967_294u32, or Module.Idx(Bool) = maxU32 - 2 = 4_294_967_293u32.
Counting backwards instead of using the lowest values means we don't need to actually add these to the ArrayList, and we can always know if they're builtin Module/Ident by checking if the Idx is above a certain value.
Luke Boswell (Feb 16 2025 at 00:51):Also we know what these values are at comptime, so they are constants and we can switch on them etc elsewhere.
Luke Boswell (Feb 16 2025 at 00:58):We might want to do this over the current method because then any index Idx is actually something stored in the array at that offset. Unlike today where I think things are offset by 1.
The builtins are hardcoded and not in the array, indexing into it using a builtin would blow up out of bounds, so we would know immediately if something was wired incorrectly.
Brendan Hansknecht (Feb 16 2025 at 01:09):I just think we need to make sure they don't bottleneck compilation of the roc compiler and lead to crazy amounts of rebuilds. So they probably should be compiled lazily after the roc compiler has been fully built. (Talking about the roc builtins).
Brendan Hansknecht (Feb 16 2025 at 01:10):Cause that loop is one of the most painful in the old compiler. Change almost anything -> must recompile to roc builtins -> need to recompile a ton of other things downstream.
Richard Feldman (Feb 16 2025 at 01:18):or maybe we could control that with a build flag too, like llvm?
Richard Feldman (Feb 16 2025 at 01:19):actually nm, since we want to prioritize simplicity and correctness in the 0.1.0 compiler, +1 to just doing it at runtime for now
Richard Feldman (Feb 16 2025 at 01:20):keep it simple
Richard Feldman (Feb 16 2025 at 01:20):we can always optimize more in a future revision
Sam Mohr (Feb 16 2025 at 01:21):I'm busy all day today, but in short, I'd like to see if we can have minimal hardcopies for now on builtins
Sam Mohr (Feb 16 2025 at 01:22):We should only need operator desugaring (e.g. Num.add), Str.concat, and some types like List and Str and Result
Sam Mohr (Feb 16 2025 at 01:22):And also derive functions, like to_str and encode
Sam Mohr (Feb 16 2025 at 01:23):If we can make some system that can look for an ident in "a builtin somewhere" that looks those up
Sam Mohr (Feb 16 2025 at 01:23):Then we can avoid hardcoding altogether
Sam Mohr (Feb 16 2025 at 01:24):At least for now, during the correctness is paramount phase of development
Brendan Hansknecht (Feb 16 2025 at 01:24):I don't think the runtime cost matters. Can cache it once per roc version in the global cache
Sam Mohr (Feb 16 2025 at 01:34):Agreed
Richard Feldman (Feb 16 2025 at 02:20):yeah that's a good point
Richard Feldman (Feb 16 2025 at 02:23):also in the future we can get fancy and like as soon as we see from the CLI args that we're going to be doing a check or build, we can go load all the builtins from cache into memory in the background while we proceed on the main thread to start working on the source file we got from the CLI
Anthony Bullard (Jun 23 2025 at 14:08):One question I have as I start bringing the Builtins over to the zig compiler and v0.1 syntax.
Are we doing any changes to Num? I thought I remember Richard or someone else suggesting that we don't need the Num type anymore because of static dispatch.
Anthony Bullard (Jun 23 2025 at 14:08):Bringing over Num (or it's replacement(s)) blocks bringing over a number of other Builtin modules
Richard Feldman (Jun 23 2025 at 14:12):we definitely still need the Num type as far as I know :smile:
Anthony Bullard (Jun 23 2025 at 14:20):so you think that Num moves over mostly at is as far as the structure of the types?
Richard Feldman (Jun 23 2025 at 16:47):should be exactly as-is! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC