[Cython] Utility Codes and templates

[mark florisson]

On 22 July 2011 15:54, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
> mark florisson, 22.07.2011 15:07:
>>
>> On 22 July 2011 14:38, Stefan Behnel wrote:
>>>
>>> mark florisson, 22.07.2011 13:45:
>>>>
>>>> On 22 July 2011 13:10, Stefan Behnel wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> mark florisson, 22.07.2011 12:12:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> For my work on the _memview branch (and also on fused types) I noticed
>>>>>> that UtilityCodes started weighing heavily on me in their current
>>>>>> form, so I wrote a little loader in the _memview branch:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://github.com/markflorisson88/cython/commit/e13debed2db78680ec0bd8c343433a2b73bd5e64#L2R110
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The idea is simple: you put your utility codes in Cython/Utility in
>>>>>> .pyx, .c, .h files etc, and then load them. It works for both
>>>>>> prototypes and implementations, for UtilityCode and CythonUtilityCode:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> myutility.c
>>>>>>
>>>>>> // UtilityProto: MyUtility
>>>>>> header code here
>>>>>>
>>>>>> // UtilityCode: MyUtility
>>>>>> implementation code here
>>>>>>
>>>>>> You can add as many other utilities as you like to the same file. You
>>>>>> can then load it using
>>>>>>
>>>>>>     UtilityCode.load_utility_from_file("myutility.c", "MyUtility")
>>>>>
>>>>> Why not have exactly one per file? They can't (or at least shouldn't)
>>>>> be
>>>>> interdependent anyway, since they're always loaded and injected
>>>>> separately.
>>>>> Having one per file makes it easy to take the file name and grep for
>>>>> it.
>>>>
>>>> Putting them in one file does not make them interdependent
>>>
>>> I meant the opposite direction. They shouldn't depend on each other
>>> anyway,
>>> so there's no need to put them in one file.
>>
>> Say we have one struct definition, and two utilities that depend on
>> it, but not directly on one another. I want all of them in the same
>> file, because they are *related*, just not all dependent on each
>> other.
>
> Ok, I see the use case now. How do you mark the dependencies within the
> file? And how do you mark dependencies towards other code in other files?
> I.e. how do you map the parameters that UtilityCode() current takes into the
> file format?
>
> You sure don't want to keep those in the Python code that injects (or loads)
> the utility code, do you?
>

That's what I currently do. You load the utilities with the normal
arguments, except that the implementation and prototypes are
automatically fetched from a utility code file. So you do

my_utility = UtilityCode.load("MyUtility", proto_block='...',
requires=[my_other_utility])

It wouldn't be hard to support requirements (and other options) in
utility code files though. Do you think we should?

>>>> Once the first utility is loaded from the
>>>> file, it loads all the utilities as strings from the file and caches
>>>> them.
>>>
>>> Premature optimisation? ;)
>>
>> Not at all, I have one file with multiple templates, and you can't
>> seek to their starting position. Why should you re-read the file every
>> time you load just one of them?
>
> You seem to be subscribed to misinterpreting me. ;)
>
> *Iff* you accept that multiple implementations should be in one file, then
> this approach makes sense. I was merely suggesting that the performance is
> not a reason by itself for putting multiple implementations into one file.
>

Ah, sure, I agree then :) I want this feature for my sanity, not for
optimization.

>>>> You don't want to enforce one utility per file as many utilities
>>>> are pretty small, and you want to group utilities based on their
>>>> purpose.
>>>
>>> It substantially complicates the file handling, though.
>>
>> Complicates? In what way?
>
> In the sense that you have to do something to split the file into separate
> sections before being able to apply the templating engine to it. So you have
> several levels of marker semantics in the file format, one to separate the
> implementations, one to separate the parts of an implementation, and one
> level for the templating language. I call that "complicating the file
> handling".
>
> However, given that you always need to express metadata in some way (e.g.
> for dependencies), I don't think you can do better than with two levels
> anyway, so a third won't hurt *that* much.
>

Actually, the prototype and the implementation do not need to be
grouped. i.e. it is valid to first list all prototypes and then all
implementations. So yeah, there would be two levels instead of one,
but that's what you want, because you want different parameters for
different utilities in the file, and you may load them at different
times or even multiple times with different parameters.

>>>>>> Of course you can pass in any other arguments, like proto_block, name,
>>>>>> etc. You can additionally pass it a dict for formatting (for both the
>>>>>> prototypes and the implementation)
>>>>>
>>>>> Dict? Why not keyword arguments?
>>>>
>>>> Because (Cython)UtilityCode already takes a bunch of keyword arguments
>>>
>>> But none that would still matter when you put the code into an external
>>> file. IMHO, the file should be as self contained as possible, with the
>>> exception of externally provided parameters and (obviously) the decision
>>> where the resulting utility code will eventually be injected.
>>
>> No, it matters. The load() method takes any additional keyword
>> arguments that are passed to (Cython)UtilityCode. e.g. you might want
>> to pass in the variable 'name' or 'init' into your template, but those
>> are already taken.
>
> But why would you need to pass those into the UtilityCode instantiation? As
> I said, the templates should be as self-contained as possible, just as they
> are today, as written in the Python code. Passing "init" as a parameter to
> UtilityCode() doesn't make sense to me. (not sure what exactly the "name"
> parameter is there for, though)

Well this was just a gentle start. Fortunately the init parameter is
only used twice in the entire codebase.

> Stefan
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