Open brendanzab opened 6 years ago
Just made a repo with some visitor stuff from the Zero-Overhead blog post: brendanzab/rust-visitors.
I also have a (currently broken) branch with some experiments at https://github.com/pikelet-lang/pikelet/tree/visitors
One concern is that Moniker (the name-binding library we use) is currently designed in a way that might make this hard to get much value out of. It would be neat to see if we could move Moniker to a model that more looks like what is described in Visitors Unchained and implemented in alphaLib.
At the moment we create lots of intermediate data structures between the stages in the compiler, and it would be nice to cut that down!
Using the visitor pattern might make things more efficient by allowing us to fuse various traversals into single passes. Ultimately it might even be a good idea (or even necessary) to push the visitor abstraction back to the nameless library as well. The challenge would be to continue to maintain a nice, readable codebase in the process.
Resources
libsyntax/visit.rs
(visitor module in Rustc) - uses 'walkers' to allow for default methods to simplify visitor implementations.ratel-visitor
- has an interestingbuild!
macroSerializer
anfDeserializer
traits follow this pattern.