Agenda

Big picture overview of design, and on-the-fly questions about it

Read (to an AST), Compile (AST to MIR), Eval (the MIR to a value), Print (the value). and Loop.
Question: Is this going to be a tool analogous to miri, where check-in’s that break it may not break CI immediately, but rather will just file follow-up bugs?
- Answer 1: it has to be a tool; it depends on miri (or a fork of miri)
- Answer 2: it will be even less than a submodule (where a CI automatically files follow-up bugs): There won’t be any automatic filing of follow-up bugs (alexreg has said they will handle maintenance manually); this is how miri and clippy had initially started. It could become a submodule later.
Question: Does this mean if we (rustc developers) make breaking changes to the compiler, we won’t necessarily know, right? (Unless explicit tests are added to rustc test suite.)
Answer 1: Yes, but this is considered acceptable
Answer 2: We can annotate relevant points in rustc with // REPL comments, (e.g. to avoid them being made private or removed due to lack of use in rustc).
Design doc is split into (interleaved) essential and non-essential changes
For remainder of meeting, we reviewed each essential change at a high level, and asked participatnts about their thoughts on that change.

E.g. conditionally prevents dead user variable elimination.
for example, when you do let x = ... in the repl, you want x to be kept around for the future repl inputs.
Question: Are there other contexts where one would the dead-user-variable-elim optimization disable?
Answer 1: Probably not
Answer 2: Patching a running binary, perhaps
Question: What deos it mean to prepend local variables from previous evaluation sessions?
Answer: For each live variable add #[rustc_repl_alive] let var: type;
Conclusion: No one objects to the addition of the “interpreter mode” flag

“Added insert_alloc method to machine, used by REPL for restoring memory when deserialising previous evaluation session.”
- There was some debate about exactly where this would need to go, but everyone agreed that the functionality was necessary.
“Added hooks before_statement, after_statement, before_stack_push (renamed existing method), after_stack_push, before_stack_pop, after_stack_pop (renamed existing method).”
- no objections to these additions
“Made stack pop behaviour more flexible, so as to allow the cleanup flag to be independent of wherever the action is null or a “goto”.”
- Question: What are the stack pop changes?
- Answer: it’s important that we can exit a block / pop off the stack but still not perform cleanup (so as to be able to serialise the values of the locals when execution is done).
- Question: Is the cleanup the running of destructors?
- Answer: more like clearing the local’s memory
- no objections to this addition

We reviewed some vague misgivings with certain design decisions, but no one had strong objections.

Its not typical to accept changes like this for supporting other projects, but it is also not unheard of (e.g. miri, priroda, clippy).

Conclusion: people are generally okay with moving forward with what alexreg laid out, at least the Essential portion