DeprecatedString (formerly String) has been with us since the start,
and it has served us well. However, it has a number of shortcomings
that I'd like to address.
Some of these issues are hard if not impossible to solve incrementally
inside of DeprecatedString, so instead of doing that, let's build a new
String class and then incrementally move over to it instead.
Problems in DeprecatedString:
- It assumes string allocation never fails. This makes it impossible
to use in allocation-sensitive contexts, and is the reason we had to
ban DeprecatedString from the kernel entirely.
- The awkward null state. DeprecatedString can be null. It's different
from the empty state, although null strings are considered empty.
All code is immediately nicer when using Optional<DeprecatedString>
but DeprecatedString came before Optional, which is how we ended up
like this.
- The encoding of the underlying data is ambiguous. For the most part,
we use it as if it's always UTF-8, but there have been cases where
we pass around strings in other encodings (e.g ISO8859-1)
- operator[] and length() are used to iterate over DeprecatedString one
byte at a time. This is done all over the codebase, and will *not*
give the right results unless the string is all ASCII.
How we solve these issues in the new String:
- Functions that may allocate now return ErrorOr<String> so that ENOMEM
errors can be passed to the caller.
- String has no null state. Use Optional<String> when needed.
- String is always UTF-8. This is validated when constructing a String.
We may need to add a bypass for this in the future, for cases where
you have a known-good string, but for now: validate all the things!
- There is no operator[] or length(). You can get the underlying data
with bytes(), but for iterating over code points, you should be using
an UTF-8 iterator.
Furthermore, it has two nifty new features:
- String implements a small string optimization (SSO) for strings that
can fit entirely within a pointer. This means up to 3 bytes on 32-bit
platforms, and 7 bytes on 64-bit platforms. Such small strings will
not be heap-allocated.
- String can create substrings without making a deep copy of the
substring. Instead, the superstring gets +1 refcount from the
substring, and it acts like a view into the superstring. To make
substrings like this, use the substring_with_shared_superstring() API.
One caveat:
- String does not guarantee that the underlying data is null-terminated
like DeprecatedString does today. While this was nifty in a handful of
places where we were calling C functions, it did stand in the way of
shared-superstring substrings.
We have a new, improved string type coming up in AK (OOM aware, no null
state), and while it's going to use UTF-8, the name UTF8String is a
mouthful - so let's free up the String name by renaming the existing
class.
Making the old one have an annoying name will hopefully also help with
quick adoption :^)
Currently, the floating point to string conversion is implemented
several times across the codebase. This commit provides a pretty
low-level function to unify all of such conversions. It converts the
given double to a fixed point decimal satisfying a few correctness
criteria.
This is based on the paper by Daniel Lemire called
"Number parsing at a Gigabyte per second", currently available at
https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.11408
An implementation can be found at
https://github.com/fastfloat/fast_float
To support both strtod like methods and String::to_double we have two
different APIs. The parse_first_floating_point gives back both the
result, next character to read and the error/out of range status.
Out of range here means we rounded to infinity 0.
The other API, parse_floating_point_completely, will return a floating
point only if the given character range contains just the floating point
and nothing else. This can be much faster as we can skip actually
computing the value if we notice we did not parse the whole range.
Both of these APIs support a very lenient format to be usable in as many
places as possible. Also it does not check for "named" values like
"nan", "inf", "NAN" etc. Because this can be different for every usage.
For integers and small values this new method is not faster and often
even a tiny bit slower than the current strtod implementation. However
the strtod implementation is wrong for a lot of values and has a much
less predictable running time.
For correctness this method was tested against known string -> double
datasets from https://github.com/nigeltao/parse-number-fxx-test-data
This method gives 100% accuracy.
The old strtod gave an incorrect value in over 50% of the numbers
tested.
This lets us remove a glob pattern from LibC, the DynamicLoader, and,
later, Lagom. The Kernel already has its own separate list of AK files
that it wants, which is only a subset of all AK files.
Components are a group of build targets that can be built and installed
separately. Whether a component should be built can be configured with
CMake arguments: -DBUILD_<NAME>=ON|OFF, where <NAME> is the name of the
component (in all caps).
Components can be marked as REQUIRED if they're necessary for a
minimally functional base system or they can be marked as RECOMMENDED
if they're not strictly necessary but are useful for most users.
A component can have an optional description which isn't used by the
build system but may be useful for a configuration UI.
Components specify the TARGETS which should be built when the component
is enabled. They can also specify other components which they depend on
(with DEPENDS).
This also adds the BUILD_EVERYTHING CMake variable which lets the user
build all optional components. For now this defaults to ON to make the
transition to the components-based build system easier.
The list of components is exported as an INI file in the build directory
(e.g. Build/i686/components.ini).
Fixes#8048.
All usages of AK::InlineLinkedList have been converted to
AK::IntrusiveList. So it's time to retire our old friend.
Note: The empty white space change in AK/CMakeLists.txt is to
force CMake to re-glob the header files in the AK directory so
incremental build will work when folks git pull this change locally.
Otherwise they'll get errors, because CMake will attempt to install
a file which no longer exists.
These tests were never built for the serenity target. Move their Lagom
build steps to the Lagom CMakeLists.txt, and add serenity build steps
for them. Also, fix the build errors when building them with the
serenity cross-compiler :^)
Problem:
- These utility functions are only used in `AK`, but are being defined
in the top-level. This clutters the top-level.
Solution:
- Move the utility functions to `Meta/CMake/utils.cmake` and include
where needed.
- Also, move `all_the_debug_macros.cmake` into `Meta/CMake` directory
to consolidate the location of `*.cmake` script files.
The SDL port failed to build because the CMake toolchain filed pointed
to the old root. Now the toolchain file assumes that the Root is in
Build/Root.
Additionally, the AK/ and Kernel/ headers need to be installed in the
root too.
