nushell/crates/nu-protocol
Reilly Wood 3b5172a8fa
LazyRecord (#7619)
This is an attempt to implement a new `Value::LazyRecord` variant for
performance reasons.

`LazyRecord` is like a regular `Record`, but it's possible to access
individual columns without evaluating other columns. I've implemented
`LazyRecord` for the special `$nu` variable; accessing `$nu` is
relatively slow because of all the information in `scope`, and [`$nu`
accounts for about 2/3 of Nu's startup time on
Linux](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6677#issuecomment-1364618122).

### Benchmarks

I ran some benchmarks on my desktop (Linux, 12900K) and the results are
very pleasing.

Nu's time to start up and run a command (`cargo build --release;
hyperfine 'target/release/nu -c "echo \"Hello, world!\""' --shell=none
--warmup 10`) goes from **8.8ms to 3.2ms, about 2.8x faster**.

Tests are also much faster! Running `cargo nextest` (with our very slow
`proptest` tests disabled) goes from **7.2s to 4.4s (1.6x faster)**,
because most tests involve launching a new instance of Nu.

### Design (updated)

I've added a new `LazyRecord` trait and added a `Value` variant wrapping
those trait objects, much like `CustomValue`. `LazyRecord`
implementations must implement these 2 functions:

```rust
// All column names
fn column_names(&self) -> Vec<&'static str>;

// Get 1 specific column value
fn get_column_value(&self, column: &str) -> Result<Value, ShellError>;
 ```

### Serializability

`Value` variants must implement `Serializable` and `Deserializable`, which poses some problems because I want to use unserializable things like `EngineState` in `LazyRecord`s. To work around this, I basically lie to the type system:

1. Add `#[typetag::serde(tag = "type")]` to `LazyRecord` to make it serializable
2. Any unserializable fields in `LazyRecord` implementations get marked with `#[serde(skip)]`
3. At the point where a `LazyRecord` normally would get serialized and sent to a plugin, I instead collect it into a regular `Value::Record` (which can be serialized)
2023-01-18 19:27:26 -08:00
..
src LazyRecord (#7619) 2023-01-18 19:27:26 -08:00
tests Further cleanup of Span::test_data usage + span fixes (#7595) 2022-12-24 07:41:57 -06:00
Cargo.toml Add cursor shape configuration for each edit mode (#7745) 2023-01-13 14:37:39 -06:00
LICENSE Include license text in all crates (#5094) 2022-04-08 10:47:13 +02:00
README.md Add nu-protocol 2021-09-02 13:29:43 +12:00

nu-protocol

The nu-protocol crate holds the definitions of structs/traits that are used throughout Nushell. This gives us one way to expose them to many other crates, as well as make these definitions available to each other, without causing mutually recursive dependencies.