flan/lib/expand.ml
Joseph Ferano 0e7f53a510 Quasiquote is a desugaring, and a defmacro is a defn
Two things that look like plumbing and are the frontend half of expansion.

A quasiquote becomes calls to the prelude's three form-building functions and
nothing else: form-nil, form-cons for an item, form-append for a splice. It is
pure, it needs nothing loaded, and it runs over every form on the way into
Parse.program and Parse.decl, which is what lets the prelude's own macros parse
in a process that has not built a macro module yet.

Running it *before* the expander's walk is not an ordering preference. A cond
macro's body contains a quasiquoted (cond ...) for its own tail; with the
quasiquote still standing, the walk would see that head and expand it then and
there, against the wrong arguments. Desugared first, that subform is a
(Form.Sym {.s "cond"}) and there is no head left to mistake. So the walk needs
no idea that quoting exists, which is the whole reason this runs first.

Nesting levels are not counted -- not by the reader, which was written that way
deliberately, and not here. A quasiquote inside a quasiquote is refused by
name. Only a macro that writes a macro wants one, nothing in the corpus does,
and CL's level arithmetic costs more than the use case is worth so far.

A defmacro is now an Ast.Defn: (defmacro m [args] body) is
(defn m [args [Form]] Form body). There is no Ast.Defmacro and there is not
going to be one -- a macro is [Form] -> Form, compiled by the same backend as
everything else, and the only thing that makes it a macro is that the expander
calls it at compile time. One parameter, the slice of forms at the call site,
so variadics come free in a language with no &rest; two parameters is a
misunderstanding rather than an arity error and says so.

Parse.expander is the hook the walk arrives through, because expanding a macro
means compiling and dlopening it, so the expander sits above Check and Build
and Parse sits below them. Nothing fills it in yet.

The quasiquote refusal stays as a backstop: it now means a form reached the
parser without coming through program or decl. gensym's refusal is gone -- it
is an ordinary prelude function returning a Form, and a macro body calls it
like any other.
2026-09-12 20:51:06 +07:00

234 lines
10 KiB
OCaml

(** Macro expansion: the pass between the reader and [Parse].
There is no interpreter and there is not going to be one (BUILT.md, "Why
there is no interpreter"), so running a macro at compile time means
compiling it and loading it into this process. Every piece of that is
already built and measured — [Emit.macro_thunk], [Build.macro_module],
[Dynload] — and this file is the two halves nobody had written: the image
format the two sides share, and the walk that finds macro calls and
replaces them.
Expansion runs over [Form], before [Parse]. Not over [Ast]: [Parse] refuses
[defmacro] outright and there is no [Ast.Defmacro], so an Ast-level pass
would have nothing to work with. That refusal is the ordering. It is also
Clojure's ordering, and it is why a macro expanding to a special form is
ordinary here rather than a special case. *)
(* ── The image format ──────────────────────────────────────────────
A Form is { i32 tag, [2 x i64] payload }: 24 bytes, align 8, payload at
offset 8. Those three numbers are the whole agreement between this file and
the compiled macro, and they are not taken on trust — test_acceptance.ml's
"Form's image format" asks LLVM for each of them through the same ptrtoint
oracle the DWARF offsets go through. Change the prelude's defunion and that
test says which number moved.
The tag is the case's position in the prelude's (defunion Form ...), which
is why that list is a layout contract and says so. *)
let form_size = 24
let payload = 8
(* A string and a slice are both %slice = { ptr, i64 }: two words at the start
of the payload. Every case of Form holds one member, so there is no third
offset anywhere below. *)
let ptr_off = payload
let len_off = payload + 8
type tag =
| TSym | TKw | TInt | TFloat | TStr | TByte | TList | TVec | TMap
let tag_int = function
| TSym -> 0l | TKw -> 1l | TInt -> 2l | TFloat -> 3l | TStr -> 4l
| TByte -> 5l | TList -> 6l | TVec -> 7l | TMap -> 8l
let tag_of_int = function
| 0l -> TSym | 1l -> TKw | 2l -> TInt | 3l -> TFloat | 4l -> TStr
| 5l -> TByte | 6l -> TList | 7l -> TVec | 8l -> TMap
| n ->
failwith
(Printf.sprintf
"a macro returned a Form with tag %ld, and Form has nine cases. The \
prelude's (defunion Form ...) and lib/expand.ml's tag list are one \
contract and have come apart"
n)
(* ── Writing a Form into memory a macro can read ───────────────────
OCaml cannot address raw memory, so this goes through the poke family in
dynload_stubs.c, one field at a time. Everything allocated here is owned by
[Dynload] and released together after the call. *)
let rec marshal (f : Form.t) : Dynload.addr =
let p = Dynload.take form_size in
write p f;
p
(* Into an existing 24 bytes, which is what an argument array needs: the macro
takes a [Form] slice, and a slice is contiguous elements and not an array of
pointers. *)
and write p (f : Form.t) =
let tag t = Dynload.poke_i32 p 0 (tag_int t) in
let str t s =
tag t;
let n = String.length s in
(* A zero-length string still gets a pointer, because a slice with a null
base is not the same value as one with a live base and a zero length --
the difference shows the day something concatenates onto it. *)
let b = Dynload.take (max n 1) in
if n > 0 then Dynload.poke_bytes b 0 s;
Dynload.poke_ptr p ptr_off b;
Dynload.poke_i64 p len_off (Int64.of_int n)
in
let seq t xs =
tag t;
let n = List.length xs in
let b = Dynload.take (max (n * form_size) 1) in
List.iteri (fun i x -> write (Nativeint.add b (Nativeint.of_int (i * form_size))) x) xs;
Dynload.poke_ptr p ptr_off b;
Dynload.poke_i64 p len_off (Int64.of_int n)
in
match f.Form.v with
| Form.Sym s -> str TSym s
| Form.Kw s -> str TKw s
| Form.Str s -> str TStr s
| Form.Int i -> tag TInt; Dynload.poke_i64 p payload i
| Form.Float x -> tag TFloat; Dynload.poke_f64 p payload x
| Form.Byte b -> tag TByte; Dynload.poke_i32 p payload (Int32.of_int b)
| Form.List xs -> seq TList xs
| Form.Vec xs -> seq TVec xs
| Form.Map xs -> seq TMap xs
(* ── Reading one back ──────────────────────────────────────────────
[loc] is the call site's, stamped onto every node. A macro cannot invent a
source location and the image has no room for one: Form on the Flan side
mirrors [Form.value], not [Form.t]. So an error inside an expansion points
at the call that produced it, which is the part of "the error carries the
expansion" that can be had now without the structured-error rewrite. *)
let rec unmarshal ~loc (p : Dynload.addr) : Form.t =
let str () =
let b = Dynload.peek_ptr p ptr_off in
let n = Int64.to_int (Dynload.peek_i64 p len_off) in
if n = 0 then "" else Dynload.peek_bytes b 0 n
in
let seq () =
let b = Dynload.peek_ptr p ptr_off in
let n = Int64.to_int (Dynload.peek_i64 p len_off) in
List.init n (fun i ->
unmarshal ~loc (Nativeint.add b (Nativeint.of_int (i * form_size))))
in
let v =
match tag_of_int (Dynload.peek_i32 p 0) with
| TSym -> Form.Sym (str ())
| TKw -> Form.Kw (str ())
| TStr -> Form.Str (str ())
| TInt -> Form.Int (Dynload.peek_i64 p payload)
| TFloat -> Form.Float (Dynload.peek_f64 p payload)
| TByte -> Form.Byte (Int32.to_int (Dynload.peek_i32 p payload) land 0xff)
| TList -> Form.List (seq ())
| TVec -> Form.Vec (seq ())
| TMap -> Form.Map (seq ())
in
Form.make v loc
(* ── One call ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The arguments are one contiguous run of Forms, not an array of pointers,
because the macro's parameter is [[Form]] and a Flan slice is { ptr, len }
over elements. *)
let call ~loc (fn : Dynload.addr) (args : Form.t list) : Form.t =
let n = List.length args in
let a = Dynload.take (max (n * form_size) 1) in
List.iteri
(fun i x -> write (Nativeint.add a (Nativeint.of_int (i * form_size))) x)
args;
let out = Dynload.take form_size in
Dynload.call fn a (Int64.of_int n) out;
unmarshal ~loc out
(* ── Quasiquote ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
A desugaring over [Form], and nothing more: a quasiquoted (if ~t ~b) becomes
calls to the prelude's form-building surface, which the checker then sees as
ordinary code. There is no quasiquote left in the language after this runs,
which is why the expander's own walk needs no idea that quoting exists: by
the time it looks for macro calls, a [cond] written inside a quasiquote is a
(Form.Sym {.s "cond"}) and there is no head there to mistake for a call the
compiler should make now.
The reader stays dumb and produces (quasiquote x), (unquote x) and
(unquote-splicing x) with no idea whether one is inside another. Counting
levels is this file's job, and it does not: a quasiquote inside a quasiquote
is refused by name. A macro that writes a macro is the only thing that wants
one, nothing in the corpus does, and CL's level arithmetic has a real cost
that no use case has asked for. *)
let sym loc s = Form.make (Form.Sym s) loc
let lst loc xs = Form.make (Form.List xs) loc
(* (Form.Case {.field value}) — a node of the image, written as the Flan
constructor the prelude declares. *)
let node loc case field v =
lst loc [ sym loc ("Form." ^ case);
Form.make (Form.Map [ sym loc ("." ^ field); Form.make v loc ]) loc ]
let unquote_of (f : Form.t) =
match f.Form.v with
| Form.List [ { Form.v = Form.Sym "unquote"; _ }; x ] -> Some x
| _ -> None
let splice_of (f : Form.t) =
match f.Form.v with
| Form.List [ { Form.v = Form.Sym "unquote-splicing"; _ }; x ] -> Some x
| _ -> None
let rec quote (f : Form.t) : Form.t =
let loc = f.Form.loc in
match unquote_of f with
(* The escape: whatever the program wrote, evaluated. It is already a Form,
because a Form is what a macro body deals in. *)
| Some x -> x
| None ->
match splice_of f with
| Some _ ->
Loc.fail loc
"~@x splices into a list or a vector, and there is nothing here for it \
to splice into"
| None ->
match f.Form.v with
| Form.List ({ Form.v = Form.Sym "quasiquote"; _ } :: _) ->
Loc.fail loc
"a quasiquote inside a quasiquote is not implemented: the reader does \
not count nesting levels and neither does this, so the inner one has \
no meaning to give. Build the inner form with form-cons"
| Form.Sym s -> node loc "Sym" "s" (Form.Str s)
| Form.Kw s -> node loc "Kw" "s" (Form.Str s)
| Form.Int i -> node loc "Int" "i" (Form.Int i)
| Form.Float x -> node loc "Float" "x" (Form.Float x)
| Form.Str s -> node loc "Str" "s" (Form.Str s)
| Form.Byte b -> node loc "Byte" "b" (Form.Int (Int64.of_int b))
| Form.List xs -> node loc "List" "xs" (seq loc xs).Form.v
| Form.Vec xs -> node loc "Vec" "xs" (seq loc xs).Form.v
| Form.Map xs -> node loc "Map" "xs" (seq loc xs).Form.v
(* The [Form] slice one bracket's worth of items comes to. Built right to left,
so each item is consed onto what follows it and a splice is an append — the
three prelude functions and no fourth. *)
and seq loc items =
List.fold_left
(fun acc (item : Form.t) ->
match splice_of item with
| Some x -> lst item.Form.loc [ sym item.Form.loc "form-append"; x; acc ]
| None -> lst item.Form.loc [ sym item.Form.loc "form-cons"; quote item; acc ])
(lst loc [ sym loc "form-nil" ])
(List.rev items)
(* Every quasiquote in a form, outermost first. Pure, total, and dependent on
nothing but Form, which is what lets [Parse] run it on the way in rather
than needing the whole expander wired up first. *)
let rec quasiquote (f : Form.t) : Form.t =
match f.Form.v with
| Form.List [ { Form.v = Form.Sym "quasiquote"; _ }; x ] -> quote x
| Form.List xs -> Form.make (Form.List (List.map quasiquote xs)) f.Form.loc
| Form.Vec xs -> Form.make (Form.Vec (List.map quasiquote xs)) f.Form.loc
| Form.Map xs -> Form.make (Form.Map (List.map quasiquote xs)) f.Form.loc
| _ -> f