open-nomad/vendor/golang.org/x/tools/go/loader/doc.go
Seth Hoenig 435c0d9fc8 deps: Switch to Go modules for dependency management
This PR switches the Nomad repository from using govendor to Go modules
for managing dependencies. Aspects of the Nomad workflow remain pretty
much the same. The usual Makefile targets should continue to work as
they always did. The API submodule simply defers to the parent Nomad
version on the repository, keeping the semantics of API versioning that
currently exists.
2020-06-02 14:30:36 -05:00

205 lines
9.4 KiB
Go

// Copyright 2015 The Go Authors. All rights reserved.
// Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style
// license that can be found in the LICENSE file.
// Package loader loads a complete Go program from source code, parsing
// and type-checking the initial packages plus their transitive closure
// of dependencies. The ASTs and the derived facts are retained for
// later use.
//
// Deprecated: This is an older API and does not have support
// for modules. Use golang.org/x/tools/go/packages instead.
//
// The package defines two primary types: Config, which specifies a
// set of initial packages to load and various other options; and
// Program, which is the result of successfully loading the packages
// specified by a configuration.
//
// The configuration can be set directly, but *Config provides various
// convenience methods to simplify the common cases, each of which can
// be called any number of times. Finally, these are followed by a
// call to Load() to actually load and type-check the program.
//
// var conf loader.Config
//
// // Use the command-line arguments to specify
// // a set of initial packages to load from source.
// // See FromArgsUsage for help.
// rest, err := conf.FromArgs(os.Args[1:], wantTests)
//
// // Parse the specified files and create an ad hoc package with path "foo".
// // All files must have the same 'package' declaration.
// conf.CreateFromFilenames("foo", "foo.go", "bar.go")
//
// // Create an ad hoc package with path "foo" from
// // the specified already-parsed files.
// // All ASTs must have the same 'package' declaration.
// conf.CreateFromFiles("foo", parsedFiles)
//
// // Add "runtime" to the set of packages to be loaded.
// conf.Import("runtime")
//
// // Adds "fmt" and "fmt_test" to the set of packages
// // to be loaded. "fmt" will include *_test.go files.
// conf.ImportWithTests("fmt")
//
// // Finally, load all the packages specified by the configuration.
// prog, err := conf.Load()
//
// See examples_test.go for examples of API usage.
//
//
// CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY
//
// The WORKSPACE is the set of packages accessible to the loader. The
// workspace is defined by Config.Build, a *build.Context. The
// default context treats subdirectories of $GOROOT and $GOPATH as
// packages, but this behavior may be overridden.
//
// An AD HOC package is one specified as a set of source files on the
// command line. In the simplest case, it may consist of a single file
// such as $GOROOT/src/net/http/triv.go.
//
// EXTERNAL TEST packages are those comprised of a set of *_test.go
// files all with the same 'package foo_test' declaration, all in the
// same directory. (go/build.Package calls these files XTestFiles.)
//
// An IMPORTABLE package is one that can be referred to by some import
// spec. Every importable package is uniquely identified by its
// PACKAGE PATH or just PATH, a string such as "fmt", "encoding/json",
// or "cmd/vendor/golang.org/x/arch/x86/x86asm". A package path
// typically denotes a subdirectory of the workspace.
//
// An import declaration uses an IMPORT PATH to refer to a package.
// Most import declarations use the package path as the import path.
//
// Due to VENDORING (https://golang.org/s/go15vendor), the
// interpretation of an import path may depend on the directory in which
// it appears. To resolve an import path to a package path, go/build
// must search the enclosing directories for a subdirectory named
// "vendor".
//
// ad hoc packages and external test packages are NON-IMPORTABLE. The
// path of an ad hoc package is inferred from the package
// declarations of its files and is therefore not a unique package key.
// For example, Config.CreatePkgs may specify two initial ad hoc
// packages, both with path "main".
//
// An AUGMENTED package is an importable package P plus all the
// *_test.go files with same 'package foo' declaration as P.
// (go/build.Package calls these files TestFiles.)
//
// The INITIAL packages are those specified in the configuration. A
// DEPENDENCY is a package loaded to satisfy an import in an initial
// package or another dependency.
//
package loader
// IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
//
// 'go test', in-package test files, and import cycles
// ---------------------------------------------------
//
// An external test package may depend upon members of the augmented
// package that are not in the unaugmented package, such as functions
// that expose internals. (See bufio/export_test.go for an example.)
// So, the loader must ensure that for each external test package
// it loads, it also augments the corresponding non-test package.
//
// The import graph over n unaugmented packages must be acyclic; the
// import graph over n-1 unaugmented packages plus one augmented
// package must also be acyclic. ('go test' relies on this.) But the
// import graph over n augmented packages may contain cycles.
//
// First, all the (unaugmented) non-test packages and their
// dependencies are imported in the usual way; the loader reports an
// error if it detects an import cycle.
//
// Then, each package P for which testing is desired is augmented by
// the list P' of its in-package test files, by calling
// (*types.Checker).Files. This arrangement ensures that P' may
// reference definitions within P, but P may not reference definitions
// within P'. Furthermore, P' may import any other package, including
// ones that depend upon P, without an import cycle error.
//
// Consider two packages A and B, both of which have lists of
// in-package test files we'll call A' and B', and which have the
// following import graph edges:
// B imports A
// B' imports A
// A' imports B
// This last edge would be expected to create an error were it not
// for the special type-checking discipline above.
// Cycles of size greater than two are possible. For example:
// compress/bzip2/bzip2_test.go (package bzip2) imports "io/ioutil"
// io/ioutil/tempfile_test.go (package ioutil) imports "regexp"
// regexp/exec_test.go (package regexp) imports "compress/bzip2"
//
//
// Concurrency
// -----------
//
// Let us define the import dependency graph as follows. Each node is a
// list of files passed to (Checker).Files at once. Many of these lists
// are the production code of an importable Go package, so those nodes
// are labelled by the package's path. The remaining nodes are
// ad hoc packages and lists of in-package *_test.go files that augment
// an importable package; those nodes have no label.
//
// The edges of the graph represent import statements appearing within a
// file. An edge connects a node (a list of files) to the node it
// imports, which is importable and thus always labelled.
//
// Loading is controlled by this dependency graph.
//
// To reduce I/O latency, we start loading a package's dependencies
// asynchronously as soon as we've parsed its files and enumerated its
// imports (scanImports). This performs a preorder traversal of the
// import dependency graph.
//
// To exploit hardware parallelism, we type-check unrelated packages in
// parallel, where "unrelated" means not ordered by the partial order of
// the import dependency graph.
//
// We use a concurrency-safe non-blocking cache (importer.imported) to
// record the results of type-checking, whether success or failure. An
// entry is created in this cache by startLoad the first time the
// package is imported. The first goroutine to request an entry becomes
// responsible for completing the task and broadcasting completion to
// subsequent requestors, which block until then.
//
// Type checking occurs in (parallel) postorder: we cannot type-check a
// set of files until we have loaded and type-checked all of their
// immediate dependencies (and thus all of their transitive
// dependencies). If the input were guaranteed free of import cycles,
// this would be trivial: we could simply wait for completion of the
// dependencies and then invoke the typechecker.
//
// But as we saw in the 'go test' section above, some cycles in the
// import graph over packages are actually legal, so long as the
// cycle-forming edge originates in the in-package test files that
// augment the package. This explains why the nodes of the import
// dependency graph are not packages, but lists of files: the unlabelled
// nodes avoid the cycles. Consider packages A and B where B imports A
// and A's in-package tests AT import B. The naively constructed import
// graph over packages would contain a cycle (A+AT) --> B --> (A+AT) but
// the graph over lists of files is AT --> B --> A, where AT is an
// unlabelled node.
//
// Awaiting completion of the dependencies in a cyclic graph would
// deadlock, so we must materialize the import dependency graph (as
// importer.graph) and check whether each import edge forms a cycle. If
// x imports y, and the graph already contains a path from y to x, then
// there is an import cycle, in which case the processing of x must not
// wait for the completion of processing of y.
//
// When the type-checker makes a callback (doImport) to the loader for a
// given import edge, there are two possible cases. In the normal case,
// the dependency has already been completely type-checked; doImport
// does a cache lookup and returns it. In the cyclic case, the entry in
// the cache is still necessarily incomplete, indicating a cycle. We
// perform the cycle check again to obtain the error message, and return
// the error.
//
// The result of using concurrency is about a 2.5x speedup for stdlib_test.