[Cython] Fused Types

[Robert Bradshaw]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 7:09 PM, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
> mark florisson, 28.04.2011 23:29:
>>
>> On 28 April 2011 22:31, mark florisson wrote:
>>>
>>> On 28 April 2011 22:12, Robert Bradshaw wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:48 PM, mark florisson wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> So I fixed all that, but I'm currently wondering about the proposed
>>>>> cython.typeof(). I believe it currently returns a string with the type
>>>>> name, and not the type itself.
>>>>
>>>> Yes. This is just because there's not really anything better to return
>>>> at this point. We should "fix" this at some point in the future.
>>>>
>>>>> So I think it would be inconsistent to
>>>>> suddenly start allowing comparison with 'is' and 'isinstance' and
>>>>> such.
>>>>
>>>> I'm open to other suggestions, but would like an expression that
>>>> resolves at compile time to true/false (and we need to do branch
>>>> pruning on it). Note that type() is not good enough, because it has
>>>> different semantics, i.e.
>>>>
>>>>    cdef object o = []
>>>>    typeof(o), type(o)
>>>>
>>>> so lets not touch that one.
>>>
>>> Right, so for fused types I don't mind string comparison with
>>> cython.typeof(), but retrieval of the actual type for casts and
>>> declaration remains open. I'd be fine with something like
>>> cython.gettype().
>>
>> It seems that this isn't optimized yet, but it looks to me like it
>> wouldn't be very hard to do so. At least == and != could be resolved
>> at compile time if the other operand is a string literal.
>
> Well, the obvious place where this would happen for free would be constant
> folding. But that runs *way* before type analysis, so all it sees is the
> typeof() call, not the string.

Actually, to support code like

ctypedef cython.fused_type(object, double) my_fused_type

cdef foo(my_fused_type x):
    if my_fused_type is object:
        print x.attr
    else:
        cdef my_fused_type *ptr = &x

we need to resolve this branch and prune "dead code" before type
analysis, so I'm thinking it may need to be a special phase, perhaps
part of the fused-type-specialization phase. Here's another idea:

cdef foo(numeric x):
    if numeric in floating:
        ...
    elif numeric is long:
        ...
    else:
        ...
    print numeric is double   # after the specialization pass, this
would be a literal True/False node.

Again, this would all be resolved before type analysis. In terms of
syntactically supporting pointers, we could either support "fused_type
is typeof(void*)" or require typedefs for types not representable by
an ExprNode. (This would make declaring fused types syntactically
simpler as well...) I prefer the latter.

- Robert


> Optimising this would thus basically require a second (simpler?) constant
> folding step, or at least an additional hook during (or after) type analysis
> that does the comparison. I wouldn't mind too much, given that type analysis
> can end up injecting some rather handy information into the tree. So a
> second (even complete) constant folding step *after* type analysis may still
> introduce some nice optimisations.
>
> We may actually consider splitting constant folding into two steps - one
> that calculates the results as early as possible (and maybe does only
> safe&obvious tree replacements, e.g. boolean values, strings, etc.) and a
> second step that replaces subtrees by constant nodes once it knows the final
> type of the result.
>
> Stefan
> _______________________________________________
> cython-devel mailing list
> cython-devel at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/cython-devel
>