[swift-evolution] [swift-evolution-announce] [Review] SE-0089: Replace protocol<P1, P2> syntax with Any<P1, P2>

[Dave Abrahams]

on Wed Jun 08 2016, Matthew Johnson <matthew-AT-anandabits.com> wrote:

>> On Jun 8, 2016, at 1:33 PM, Dave Abrahams <dabrahams at apple.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> on Tue Jun 07 2016, Matthew Johnson <matthew-AT-anandabits.com> wrote:
>> 
>
>>>> On Jun 7, 2016, at 9:15 PM, Dave Abrahams <dabrahams at apple.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> on Tue Jun 07 2016, Matthew Johnson <matthew-AT-anandabits.com <http://matthew-at-anandabits.com/>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>> 
>>>>>> On Jun 7, 2016, at 4:13 PM, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> on Tue Jun 07 2016, Matthew Johnson <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> , but haven't realized
>>>>>>>> that if you step around the type relationships encoded in Self
>>>>>>>> requirements and associated types you end up with types that appear to
>>>>>>>> interoperate but in fact trap at runtime unless used in exactly the
>>>>>>>> right way.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Trap at runtime?  How so?  Generalized existentials should still be
>>>>>>> type-safe.  
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> There are two choices when you erase static type relationships:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 1. Acheive type-safety by trapping at runtime
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> FloatingPoint(3.0 as Float) + FloatingPoint(3.0 as Double) // trap
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 2. Don't expose protocol requirements that involve these relationships,
>>>>>> which would prevent the code above from compiling and prevent
>>>>>> FloatingPoint from conforming to itself.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Or are you talking about the hypothetical types / behaviors people
>>>>>>> think they want when they don’t fully understand what is happening...
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I don't know what you mean here.  I think generalized existentials will
>>>>>> be nice to have, but I think most people will want them to do something
>>>>>> they can't possibly do.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Exactly.  What I meant is that people think they want that expression
>>>>> to compile because they don’t understand that the only thing it can do
>>>>> is trap.  I said “hypothetical” because producing a compile time error
>>>>> rather than a runtime trap is the only sane thing to do.  Your comment
>>>>> surprised me because I can’t imagine we would move forward in Swift
>>>>> with the approach of trapping.
>>>> 
>>>> I would very much like to be able to create instances of “Collection
>>>> where Element == Int” so we can throw away the wrappers in the stdlib.
>>>> That will require some type mismatches to be caught at runtime via
>>>> trapping.
>>> 
>>> For invalid index because the existential accepts a type erased index?
>> 
>> Exactly.
>> 
>>> How do you decide where to draw the line here?  It feels like a very
>>> slippery slope for a language where safety is a stated priority to
>>> start adopting a strategy of runtime trapping for something as
>>> fundamental as how you expose members on an existential.
>> 
>> If you don't do this, the alternative is that “Collection where Element
>> == Int” does not conform to Collection.  
>
> This isn’t directly related to having self or associated type
> requirements.  It is true of all existentials.  

That is just an implementation limitation today, IIUC.  What I'm talking
about here would make it impossible for some to do that.

> If that changes for simple existentials and generalized existentials
> expose all members (as in the latest draft of the proposal) maybe it
> will be possible for all existentials to conform to their protocol.

Not without introducing runtime traps.  See my “subscript function”
example.

>
>> That's weird and not very
>> useful.  You could expose all the methods that were on protocol
>> extensions of Collection on this existential, unless they used
>> associated types other than the element type.  But you couldn't pass the
>> existential to a generic function like
>> 
>>   func scrambled<C: Collection>(_ c: C) -> [C.Element]
>> 
>>> IMO you should *have* to introduce unsafe behavior like that manually.
>> 
>>  Collection where Element == Int & Index == *
>> 
>> ?
>
> I didn’t mean directly through the type of the existential.

My question is, why not?  That is still explicit.

> One obvious mechanism for introducing unsafe behavior is to write
> manual type erasure wrappers like we do today.
>
> Another possibility would be to allow extending the existential type
> (not the protocol).  This would allow you to write overloads on the
> Collection existential that takes some kind of type erased index if
> that is what you want and either trap if you receive an invalid index
> or better (IMO) return an `Element?`.  I’m not sure how extensions on
> existentials might be implemented, but this is an example of the kind
> of operation you might want available on it that you wouldn’t want
> available on all Collection types.
>
>> 
>>> Collection indices are already something that isn’t fully statically
>>> safe so I understand why you might want to allow this.  
>> 
>> By the same measure, so are Ints :-)
>> 
>> The fact that a type's methods have preconditions does *not* make it
>> “statically unsafe.”
>
> That depends on what you mean by safe.  Sure, those methods aren’t
> going corrupt memory, but they *are* going to explicitly and
> intentionally crash for some inputs.  That doesn’t qualify as “fully
> safe” IMO.

Please pick a term other than “unsafe” here; it's not unsafe in the
sense we mean the word in Swift.  It's safe in exactly the same way that
array indexes and integers are.  When you violate a precondition, it
traps.

The user doesn't do anything “manual” to introduce that trapping
behavior for integers.  Preconditions are a natural part of most types.

>>> But I don’t think having the language's existentials do this
>>> automatically is the right approach.  Maybe there is another approach
>>> that could be used in targeted use cases where the less safe behavior
>>> makes sense and is carefully designed.
>> 
>> Whether it makes sense or not really depends on the use-cases.  There's
>> little point in generalizing existentials if the result isn't very useful.
>
> Usefulness depends on your perspective.  

Of course.  As I've said, let's look at the use cases.

> I have run into several scenarios where they would be very useful
> without needing to be prone to crashes when used incorrectly.  One
> obvious basic use case is storing things in a heterogenous collection
> where you bind .

bind what?

>
>
>> The way to find out is to take a look at the examples we currently have
>> of protocols with associated types or Self requirements and consider
>> what you'd be able to do with their existentials if type relationships
>> couldn't be erased.  
>> 
>> We have known use-cases, currently emulated in the standard library, for
>> existentials with erased type relationships.  *If* these represent the
>> predominant use cases for something like generalized existentials, it
>> seems to me that the language feature should support that.  Note: I have
>> not seen anyone build an emulation of the other kind of generalized
>> existential.  My theory: there's a good reason for that :-).
>
> AFAIK (and I could be wrong) the only rules in the language that
> require the compiler to synthesize a trap except using a nil IUO, `!`
> on a nil Optional, and an invalid `as` cast .  These are all
> syntactically explicit unsafe / dangerous operations.  All other traps
> are in the standard library (array index, overflow, etc).  Most
> important about all of these cases is that they have received direct
> human consideration.

There is no distinction in the user model between what might be
synthesized by the language and what appears on standard library types.

> Introducing a language (not library) mechanism that exposes members on
> generalized existentials in a way that relies on runtime traps for
> type safety feels to me like a pretty dramatic turn agains the stated
> priority of safety.  It will mean you must understand exactly what is
> going on and be extremely careful to use generalized existentials
> without causing crashes.  This will either make Swift code much more
> crashy or will scare people away from using generalized existentials
> (and maybe both).  

I don't accept either of those statements without seeing some analysis
of the use-cases.  For example, I don't believe that AnyCollection et al
are particularly crash-prone.  The likelihood that you'll use the wrong
index type with a collection is very, very low.  I'm less certain of
what happens with Self requirements in real cases.

> Neither of those outcomes is good.
>
> Collection indices are a somewhat special case as there is already a
> strong precondition that people are familiar with because it would be
> too costly to performance and arguably too annoying to deal with an
> Optional result in every array lookup.  IMO that is why the library is
> able to get away with it in the current type erased AnyCollection.
> But this is not a good model for exposing any members on an
> existential that do not already have a strong precondition that causes
> a trap when violated.
>
> I think a big reason why you maybe haven’t seen a lot of examples of
> people writing type erased “existentials" is because it is a huge pain
> in the neck to write this stuff manually today.  People may be
> designing around the need for them.  I haven’t seen a huge sampling of
> type erased “existentials" other people are writing but I haven’t
> written any that introduce a trap like this.  The only traps are in
> the “abstract" base class whose methods will never be called (and
> wouldn’t even be implemented if they could be marked abstract).
>
> What specific things do you think we need to be able to do that rely
> on the compiler synthesizing a trap in the way it exposes the members
> of the existential?

I don't know.  I'm saying, I don't think we understand the use-cases
well enough to make a determination.

> Here are a few examples from Austin’s proposal that safely use
> existential collections.  I don’t understand why you think this
> approach is insufficient.  Maybe you could supply a concrete example
> of a use case that can’t be written with the mechanism in Austin’s
> proposal.
>
> https://github.com/austinzheng/swift-evolution/blob/az-existentials/proposals/XXXX-enhanced-existentials.md#associated-types-and-member-exposure <https://github.com/austinzheng/swift-evolution/blob/az-existentials/proposals/XXXX-enhanced-existentials.md#associated-types-and-member-exposure>
>
> let a : Any<Collection>
>
> // A variable whose type is the Index associated type of the underlying
> // concrete type of 'a'.
> let theIndex : a.Index = ...
>
> // A variable whose type is the Element associated type of the underlying
> // concrete type of 'a'.
> let theElement : a.Element = ...
>
> // Given a mutable collection, swap its first and last items.
> // Not a generic function. 
> func swapFirstAndLast(inout collection: Any<BidirectionalMutableCollection>) {
>     // firstIndex and lastIndex both have type "collection.Index"
>     guard let firstIndex = collection.startIndex,
>         lastIndex = collection.endIndex?.predecessor(collection) where lastIndex != firstIndex else {
>             print("Nothing to do")
>             return
>     }
>
>     // oldFirstItem has type "collection.Element"
>     let oldFirstItem = collection[firstIndex]
>
>     collection[firstIndex] = collection[lastIndex]
>     collection[lastIndex] = oldFirstItem
> }
>
> var a : Any<BidirectionalMutableCollection where .Element == String> = ...
>
> let input = "West Meoley"
>
> // Not actually necessary, since the compiler knows "a.Element" is String.
> // A fully constrained anonymous associated type is synonymous with the concrete
> // type it's forced to take on, and the two are interchangeable.
> // However, 'as' casting is still available if desired.
> let anonymousInput = input as a.Element
>
> a[a.startIndex] = anonymousInput
>
> // as mentioned, this also works:
> a[a.startIndex] = input
>
> // If the collection allows it, set the first element in the collection to a given string.
> func setFirstElementIn(inout collection: Any<Collection> toString string: String) {
>     if let element = string as? collection.Element {
>         // At this point, 'element' is of type "collection.Element"
>         collection[collection.startIndex] = element
>     }
> }

Neither of these look like they actually make *use* of the fact that
there's type erasure involved (and therefore should probably be written
as generics?).  The interesting cases with Any<Collection...>, for the
purposes of this discussion, arise when you have multiple instances of
the same existential type that wrap different concrete types.

Another problem I see: in this new world, what is the model for choosing
whether to write a function as a protocol extension/generic, or as a
regular function taking existential parameters?  Given that either of
the above could have been written either way, we need to be able to
answer that question.  When existentials don't conform to their
protocols, it seems to me that the most general thing to do is use
existentials whenever you can, and only resort to using generics when
forced by the type system.  This does not seem like a particularly good
programming model to me, but I might be convinced otherwise.

Anyway, my overall point is that this all seems like something we *can*
do and that nicely fills gaps in the type system, but not necessarily
something we *should* do until we better understand what it's actually
*for* and how it affects the programming model.

-- 
Dave