From e6cd67591b44b4902bac73febcab3c4d96724aea Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: eldritch horrors <pennae@lix.systems>
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2024 23:10:09 +0200
Subject: libexpr: rewrite the parser with pegtl instead of flex/bison
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this gives about 20% performance improvements on pure parsing. obviously
it will be less on full eval, but depending on how much parsing is to be
done (e.g. including hackage-packages.nix or not) it's more like 4%-10%.

this has been tested (with thousands of core hours of fuzzing) to ensure
that the ASTs produced by the new parser are exactly the same as the old
one would have produced. error messages will change (sometimes by a lot)
and are not yet perfect, but we would rather leave this as is for later.

test results for running only the parser (excluding the variable binding
code) in a tight loop with inputs and parameters as given are promising:

  - 40% faster on lix's package.nix at 10000 iterations
  - 1.3% faster on nixpkgs all-packages.nix at 1000 iterations
  - equivalent on all of nixpkgs concatenated at 100 iterations
    (excluding invalid files, each file surrounded with parens)

more realistic benchmarks are somewhere in between the extremes, parsing
once again getting the largest uplift. other realistic workloads improve
by a few percentage points as well, notably system builds are 4% faster.

Benchmarks summary (from ./bench/summarize.jq bench/bench-*.json)
old/bin/nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' eval -f bench/nixpkgs/pkgs/development/haskell-modules/hackage-packages.nix
  mean:     0.408s ± 0.025s
            user: 0.355s | system: 0.033s
  median:   0.389s
  range:    0.388s ... 0.442s
  relative: 1

new/bin/nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' eval -f bench/nixpkgs/pkgs/development/haskell-modules/hackage-packages.nix
  mean:     0.332s ± 0.024s
            user: 0.279s | system: 0.033s
  median:   0.314s
  range:    0.313s ... 0.361s
  relative: 0.814

---

old/bin/nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
  mean:     6.133s ± 0.022s
            user: 5.395s | system: 0.437s
  median:   6.128s
  range:    6.099s ... 6.183s
  relative: 1

new/bin/nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
  mean:     5.925s ± 0.025s
            user: 5.176s | system: 0.456s
  median:   5.934s
  range:    5.861s ... 5.943s
  relative: 0.966

---

GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE=10g old/bin/nix eval --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
  mean:     4.503s ± 0.027s
            user: 3.731s | system: 0.547s
  median:   4.499s
  range:    4.478s ... 4.541s
  relative: 1

GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE=10g new/bin/nix eval --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
  mean:     4.285s ± 0.031s
            user: 3.504s | system: 0.571s
  median:   4.281s
  range:    4.221s ... 4.328s
  relative: 0.951

---

old/bin/nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' search --no-eval-cache github:nixos/nixpkgs/e1fa12d4f6c6fe19ccb59cac54b5b3f25e160870 hello
  mean:     16.475s ± 0.07s
            user: 14.088s | system: 1.572s
  median:   16.495s
  range:    16.351s ... 16.536s
  relative: 1

new/bin/nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' search --no-eval-cache github:nixos/nixpkgs/e1fa12d4f6c6fe19ccb59cac54b5b3f25e160870 hello
  mean:     15.973s ± 0.013s
            user: 13.558s | system: 1.615s
  median:   15.973s
  range:    15.946s ... 15.99s
  relative: 0.97

---

Change-Id: Ie66ec2d045dec964632c6541e25f8f0797319ee2
---
 misc/pegtl.nix | 23 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 misc/pegtl.nix

(limited to 'misc/pegtl.nix')

diff --git a/misc/pegtl.nix b/misc/pegtl.nix
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..3fd999d9d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/misc/pegtl.nix
@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+{
+  stdenv,
+  cmake,
+  ninja,
+  fetchFromGitHub,
+}:
+
+stdenv.mkDerivation {
+  pname = "pegtl";
+  version = "3.2.7";
+
+  src = fetchFromGitHub {
+    repo = "PEGTL";
+    owner = "taocpp";
+    rev = "refs/tags/3.2.7";
+    hash = "sha256-IV5YNGE4EWVrmg2Sia/rcU8jCuiBynQGJM6n3DCWTQU=";
+  };
+
+  nativeBuildInputs = [
+    cmake
+    ninja
+  ];
+}
-- 
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