nushell/crates/nu-cmd-base
Devyn Cairns cf321ab510
Make EngineState clone cheaper with Arc on all of the heavy objects (#12229)
# Description
This makes many of the larger objects in `EngineState` into `Arc`, and
uses `Arc::make_mut` to do clone-on-write if the reference is not
unique. This is generally very cheap, giving us the best of both worlds
- allowing us to mutate without cloning if we have an exclusive
reference, and cloning if we don't.

This started as more of a curiosity for me after remembering that
`Arc::make_mut` exists and can make using `Arc` for mostly immutable
data that sometimes needs to be changed very convenient, and also after
hearing someone complain about memory usage on Discord - this is a
somewhat significant win for that.

The exact objects that were wrapped in `Arc`:

- `files`, `file_contents` - the strings and byte buffers
- `decls` - the whole `Vec`, but mostly to avoid lots of individual
`malloc()` calls on Clone rather than for memory usage
- `blocks` - the blocks themselves, rather than the outer Vec
- `modules` - the modules themselves, rather than the outer Vec
- `env_vars`, `previous_env_vars` - the entire maps
- `config`

The changes required were relatively minimal, but this is a breaking API
change. In particular, blocks are added as Arcs, to allow the parser
cache functionality to work.

With my normal nu config, running on Linux, this saves me about 15 MiB
of process memory usage when running interactively (65 MiB → 50 MiB).

This also makes quick command executions cheaper, particularly since
every REPL loop now involves a clone of the engine state so that we can
recover from a panic. It also reduces memory usage where engine state
needs to be cloned and sent to another thread or kept within an
iterator.

# User-Facing Changes
Shouldn't be any, since it's all internal stuff, but it does change some
public interfaces so it's a breaking change
2024-03-19 19:07:00 +01:00
..
src Make EngineState clone cheaper with Arc on all of the heavy objects (#12229) 2024-03-19 19:07:00 +01:00
Cargo.toml Introduce workspace dependencies (#12043) 2024-03-07 14:40:31 -08:00
LICENSE [nu-cmd-base] add missing LICENSE text (#10855) 2023-10-27 15:55:03 -05:00