Because arrow functions work rather differently than normal functions (a
bad design mistake if you ask me), I decided to be conservative with the
conversion.
I converted:
* event handlers
* callbacks
* arguments to Array.prototype.map & co.
* small standalone lambda functions
I didn't convert:
* functions assigned to object literal properties (the new shorthand
syntax would be better here)
* functions passed to "describe", "it", etc. in specs (because Jasmine
relies on dynamic "this")
See #442.
This is purely a mechanical change, not taking advantage of block scope
of "let" and "const". Minimizing variable scope will come in the next
commit.
In general, "var" is converted into "let" and "const" is used only for
immutable variables of permanent character (generally spelled in
ALL_CAPS). Using it for any immutable variable regardless on its
permanence would feel confusing.
Any code which is not transpiled and needs to run in ES6 environment
(examples, code in grammars embedded in specs, ...) is kept unchanged.
This is also true for code generated by PEG.js.
See #442.
This will allow to use ES2015 constructs in benchmark code.
The change required introducing a small server, which serves both PEG.js
and benchmark code passed through Babel and bundled together. This
allowed to convert the benchmark to regular modules and to get rid of
the hackery that was previously needed to make it run both in Node.js
and in the browser.
Note the benchmark no longer exercises the browser version.
See #442.
Implement the swap and change various directives in the source code. The
"make hint" target becomes "make lint".
The change leads to quite some errors being reported by ESLint. These
will be fixed in subsequent commits.
Note the configuration enables just the recommended rules. Later I plan
to enable more rules to enforce the coding standard. The configuration
also sets the environment to "node", which is far from ideal as the
codebase contains a mix of CommonJS, Node.js and browser code. I hope to
clean this up at some point.
This is a complete rewrite of the PEG.js code generator. Its goals are:
1. Allow optimizing the generated parser code for code size as well as
for parsing speed.
2. Prepare ground for future optimizations and big features (like
incremental parsing).
2. Replace the old template-based code-generation system with
something more lightweight and flexible.
4. General code cleanup (structure, style, variable names, ...).
New Architecture
----------------
The new code generator consists of two steps:
* Bytecode generator -- produces bytecode for an abstract virtual
machine
* JavaScript generator -- produces JavaScript code based on the
bytecode
The abstract virtual machine is stack-based. Originally I wanted to make
it register-based, but it turned out that all the code related to it
would be more complex and the bytecode itself would be longer (because
of explicit register specifications in instructions). The only downsides
of the stack-based approach seem to be few small inefficiencies (see
e.g. the |NIP| instruction), which seem to be insignificant.
The new generator allows optimizing for parsing speed or code size (you
can choose using the |optimize| option of the |PEG.buildParser| method
or the --optimize/-o option on the command-line).
When optimizing for size, the JavaScript generator emits the bytecode
together with its constant table and a generic bytecode interpreter.
Because the interpreter is small and the bytecode and constant table
grow only slowly with size of the grammar, the resulting parser is also
small.
When optimizing for speed, the JavaScript generator just compiles the
bytecode into JavaScript. The generated code is relatively efficient, so
the resulting parser is fast.
Internal Identifiers
--------------------
As a small bonus, all internal identifiers visible to user code in the
initializer, actions and predicates are prefixed by |peg$|. This lowers
the chance that identifiers in user code will conflict with the ones
from PEG.js. It also makes using any internals in user code ugly, which
is a good thing. This solves GH-92.
Performance
-----------
The new code generator improved parsing speed and parser code size
significantly. The generated parsers are now:
* 39% faster when optimizing for speed
* 69% smaller when optimizing for size (without minification)
* 31% smaller when optimizing for size (with minification)
(Parsing speed was measured using the |benchmark/run| script. Code size
was measured by generating parsers for examples in the |examples|
directory and adding up the file sizes. Minification was done by |uglify
--ascii| in version 1.3.4.)
Final Note
----------
This is just a beginning! The new code generator lays a foundation upon
which many optimizations and improvements can (and will) be made.
Stay tuned :-)
Getting rid of the |trackLineAndColumn| simplifies the code generator
(by unifying two paths in the code).
The |line| and |column| functions currently always compute all the
position info from scratch, which is horribly ineffective. This will be
improved in later commit(s).
Both the browser and the command-line version of the benchmark suite
runner now allow users to specify a value of the |trackLineAndColumn|
option. In case of the command-line version this required a minor CLI
redesign.
David Majda
Arlo Breault