Implement classes as per pcwalton's proposal

[catamorphism]

I didn't see an issue for this, so I'm making one:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2011-November/000929.html

[nikomatsakis]

classes should probably be able to declare interfaces that they implement, like impls

[lkuper]

Now that the old object system is gone, this proposal would be not only an object system redesign but an object system resurrection. :) Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it seems to me that the original motivation for Patrick's proposal is gone now, since it had to do with the limitations of the old object system.

[graydon]

Grasping for metaphors, I think it more of an object-system dissection.

Believe me when I say nobody's more sympathetic to the concerns of going-around-in-circles than myself. I've been going around in these circles for years and years. But object systems were an area I had more technical-familiarity with the variants of, than opinions on the correct formulation of. I tend to dislike OO and habitually write very close-to-the-data-structure procedural and functional code. So I chose an object system that was too conservative and conflated too much.

This is ironic since I felt much of the virtue of the obj system you and I worked on was that it didn't conflate as much as classes tend to (say, in C++). Yet it still conflated too much:

• Non-integration with type parameter system (no interface-bounding)
• Mandatory boxed representation
• Mandatory vtbl dispatch
• Mandatory representation hiding
• Only context for destructors

This conservatism was based on my own areas of interest and style, and an assumption that objects would be something we "didn't lean on much", and that most objects would be "big" and "long-lived" so the conservatism wouldn't hurt too much. This was a mistake. There are too many small-to-medium cases that benefit from object-like treatments, where one or more aspects of the conservatism would bite. People wound up avoiding the object system for its costs, and getting irate. We lost contributors and users over the apparent willingness to impose systemic costs; the obj system was one of those cost centers. Costs really matter. Take a look through http://www.cs.virginia.edu/kim/publicity/pldi09tutorials/memory-efficient-java-tutorial.pdf and reflect on the numbers. Common collections -- 80% overhead!

We've since split off all these conflated facets into orthogonal concepts, each of which can be used in its most-efficient form independent of the others.

• A destructor -- and a destructor alone -- is a resource now, and can exist absent an object. No vtbl, no heap allocation. The compiler can inline the dtor into its point-of-destruction.
• Representation hiding only happens when you access things via interfaces; the owner of a type may "look inside" the representation.
• Vtbl dispatch only happens when passing an interface-bound type parameter or boxed interface value; impl dispatch can be and often is resolved statically.
• Boxing only happens in heterogeneous boxed interface value cases, which are more rare than one might assume: lots of the time a vector of foo really does consist of 10,000 concrete foo values packed into a homogeneous array.
• Making ifaces into concepts that can apply to any type meant we could start using them as interface bounds on type-parametric functions, which makes a huge expressiveness difference. It also means we'll get inlined, specialized variants of such functions "for free" as part of the work on monomorphizing.

So please try not to look at this as a "rip it out and put it right back in" exercise. It's nothing of the sort. The pieces being put-back-in have very different characteristics: they're orthogonal to one another, more universal, and tend to perform much better. The parts that remain to be supplied in the "new" system are:

• A sugar form class for declaring a nominal record plus methods that have self.foo based access to the record fields. I'm not entirely convinced this matters, since it is pretty much pure sugar and we can do all the components in isolation already. Possibly including a subtype relation on extensions thereof. But I really don't like the sound of that, as it breaks representation uniqueness (what's the element size of an array of T if T has larger subtypes?) and makes type inference much uglier too.
• A mechanism for additive combination / mixing-in of implementation suites, for some degree of code-reuse. This is likely to be accomplished through iface-parameterized traits.

I'm much more interested in trait than class, but we'll see which of these is most likely. Minimalism is worth striving for here: every new orthogonal concept, while potentially powerful, is cognitively costly.

Much of the material written in Patrick's email above is redundant or not applicable anymore, in the presence of the iface/impl work. Which is a good thing. We have ifaces that can apply to numbers and tuples and tags now. That's great.

[beoran]

Coming from Ruby and passing by Go, I must say that I mostly agree with graydon. Still, some syntactic sugar for "class" (without subtyping) might be sweet, and might help people coming from other languages adjust.

[marijnh]

@catamorphism I see you've started adding code for this. I don't think there is any up-to-date proposal related to classes. Please open a mailing list thread to discuss whathever it is you're implementing.

[catamorphism]

@marijnh I'm implementing @pcwalton 's proposal from November (linked above), with no significant changes. I was gone while it was being discussed, so I was under the impression (from talking to Dave et al.) that the proposal had been accepted and it was just waiting for someone to have time to implement it. Is that not so?

[marijnh]

In November, there were no ifaces or impls. I thought it was agreed during last week's meeting that someone (@nmatsakis? @pcwalton?) would send a new proposal to the mailing list.

[nikomatsakis]

@marijnh I think sending a new proposal makes sense. However, I wouldn't anticipate many changes from what pcwalton originally proposed: modulo a few details, the ifaces and impls we have are a subset of the original proposal---though with the (granted, very significant!) added ability to have interface bounds. Do you think substantial changes are needed?

[marijnh]

If people feel the original proposal still applies, that works for me. I had gotten another impression from last meeting, and still feel it'd be good to clearly define things like how a class declares which interfaces it implements, but I guess it'll fall out rather naturally.

[catamorphism]

Maybe I was drifting off during that part of the meeting last week, as I don't remember it. In any case, I had thought that it would be pretty straightforward to just not implement the parts of the proposal that are already implemented :-) If anything comes up that requires a design discussion, I'll certainly post about it.

[catamorphism]

Addendum to the proposal: As per in-person discussion on Tuesday, I think we have consensus to require self.x for references to a field x of class C within C, rather than bare x. I have not implemented this change yet.

[catamorphism]

Current status: Classes with only fields work (either intra-crate or inter-crate). Methods don't work yet. I also haven't implemented the change to require self. These are the next steps on my to-do list. After that, it's on to traits.

[marijnh]

If you aren't doing this already, please try to unify the code for class methods and impl methods as much as you can, so we don't end up with yet another different kind of callable thing.

[catamorphism]

@marijnh Yes, I'm trying to do so.