development

update started from.

this omission has nagged me a number of times and i think it must have been a
simple oversight.

this way the assert will fire from the user's code rather than the one in
glue.c:h_seq_index() which is not informative without a stack trace.

also includes commented-out tests for functionality that i discovered we never
provided, namely position and length information at the granularity of
HParsedTokens. at the moment, these fields always seem to be 0. we should
probably fix that or get rid of them. in the latter case it might make sense
to move this information to HParseResult, so the user can get access to it via
h_action() as needed.

the regex backend already returned 2 for an internal failure, contrary to
documentation, so this mainly brings the latter in line with existing behavior.

at the same time, fix a bug: h_compile would previously return "false" (0) on
exceptions (longjmp).

make use of our new freedom to signal different error conditions from the
context-free backends, notably "incompatible combinator" vs. "unresolvable
conflict".

Provide an alternate interface to the arena allocator to avoid wasting time on unnecessary calls to memset()

Eliminate unnecessary hash computations in the packrat backend (roughly 2.5x speed in one benchmark)

A working h_drop_from which rewrites its underlying sequence as a sequence containing some ignored parsers.

also allow NULL argument for unamb_sub to mean default

In `h_sequence__ma` the same bug occurs, and it manifests as a crash
in the same way, so I've added a test for it.  In `h_permutation__ma`
it evidently exists in the same form, but I haven't figured out how to
reproduce it; in that case I added a fix to the implementation, but no
test.

I committed the fix for bug #19 without a test because I didn't know
how our test worked yet; here's a test.

A somewhat more desirable way to do this would be to commit the
test *first*, marked as "incomplete" with `g_test_incomplete()` (an
expected failure).  However, `g_test_incomplete()` does not handle
segfaults!  There's no way to mark a segfaulting test as an "expected
segfault".  So if you want to verify that this test reveals the bug,
you'll need to `git show thiscommit | patch -p1` or something, in a
tree that doesn't have the fix applied.  Or you can comment out the
fix, I guess.

Original behavior:

    hammer/build/debug/src/bindings/python$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. gdb python
    ...
    (gdb) r
    ...
    Python 2.7.6 (default, Nov 12 2018, 20:00:40)
    [GCC 4.8.4] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> if 1:
    ...     import hammer as h
    ...     h.choice(h.ch_range('0', '9'), h.ch_range('A', 'Z'), h.ch_range('a', 'z')).compile(h._PB_GLR)
    ...

    Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
    0xb79ecab2 in collect_nts (grammar=0x836abe0, symbol=0xb7d550a4)
        at build/debug/src/cfgrammar.c:120
    120	      for(x = (*s)->items; *x != NULL; x++) {
    (gdb) bt
    #0  0xb79ecab2 in collect_nts (grammar=0x836abe0, symbol=0xb7d550a4)
        at build/debug/src/cfgrammar.c:120
    #1  0xb79ecacd in collect_nts (grammar=0x836abe0, symbol=0x836ab58)
        at build/debug/src/cfgrammar.c:121
    #2  0xb79ec90a in h_cfgrammar_ (mm__=0xb79ff4b4 <system_allocator>,
        desugared=0x836ab58) at build/debug/src/cfgrammar.c:66
    #3  0xb79e8207 in h_lalr_compile (mm__=0xb79ff4b4 <system_allocator>,
        parser=0x836ab40, params=0x0) at build/debug/src/backends/lalr.c:280
    #4  0xb79e634a in h_glr_compile (mm__=0xb79ff4b4 <system_allocator>,
        parser=0x836ab40, params=0x0) at build/debug/src/backends/glr.c:15
    #5  0xb79f0eef in h_compile__m (mm__=0xb79ff4b4 <system_allocator>,
        parser=0x836ab40, backend=PB_GLR, params=0x0)
        at build/debug/src/hammer.c:97
    #6  0xb79f0e9d in h_compile (parser=parser@entry=0x836ab40, backend=PB_GLR,
        params=params@entry=0x0) at build/debug/src/hammer.c:92
    #7  0xb7a54ca4 in HParser__compile (backend=<optimized out>, self=0x836ab40)
        at hammer_wrap.c:3567

New behavior:

    hammer/build/debug/src/bindings/python$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. gdb python
    ...
    (gdb) r
    ...
    Python 2.7.6 (default, Nov 12 2018, 20:00:40)
    [GCC 4.8.4] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> if 1:
    ...     import hammer as h
    ...     h.choice(h.ch_range('0', '9'), h.ch_range('A', 'Z'), h.ch_range('a', 'z')).compile(h._PB_GLR)
    ...
    True
    >>> ^D
    [Inferior 1 (process 19621) exited normally]
    (gdb) quit

After thrashing about for a few hours, this was the crucial clue:

    >>> import hammer as h
    >>> h.choice(h.ch('0')).compile(h._PB_GLR)
    ==18856== Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s)
    ==18856==    at 0x4A34FE9: h_desugar (desugar.c:7)
    ==18856==    by 0x4A2D150: h_desugar_augmented (lalr.c:261)
    ==18856==    by 0x4A2D1F7: h_lalr_compile (lalr.c:280)
    ==18856==    by 0x4A2B349: h_glr_compile (glr.c:15)
    ==18856==    by 0x4A35EEE: h_compile__m (hammer.c:97)
    ==18856==    by 0x4A35E9C: h_compile (hammer.c:92)
    ==18856==    by 0x49B0CA3: HParser__compile (hammer_wrap.c:3567)

The particular thing that it's saying is uninitialized seems to be

      if(parser->desugared == NULL) {

The `parser` in question is the `HParser` we're trying to desugar,
which is presumably the choice object created by `h.choice`, which
seems to be invoking `h_choice__a`:

    def choice(*args): return _h_choice__a(list(args))

That was implemented as follows:

    HParser* h_choice__a(void *args[]) {
      return h_choice__ma(&system_allocator, args);
    }

    HParser* h_choice__ma(HAllocator* mm__, void *args[]) {
      size_t len = -1; // because do...while
      const HParser *arg;

      do {
        arg=((HParser **)args)[++len];
      } while(arg);

      HSequence *s = h_new(HSequence, 1);
      s->p_array = h_new(HParser *, len);

      for (size_t i = 0; i < len; i++) {
        s->p_array[i] = ((HParser **)args)[i];
      }

      s->len = len;
      HParser *ret = h_new(HParser, 1);
      ret->vtable = &choice_vt;
      ret->env = (void*)s;
      ret->backend = PB_MIN;
      return ret;
    }

Indeed it does not seem to have been initializing `desugared`.  Fixing
this cures this symptom.

Other things it's probably worth checking out:

- Are there other places where we create HParser objects where one or
  more fields may be uninitialized?
- Perhaps `h_new` should zero the memory it returns, since it's only
  used for fixed-size objects and not things like variable-size
  character buffers?

This was a real adventure since I didn’t know anything about SCons, and
I can’t say that I’m fond of scons after it, but it does seem to work.
There were two obstacles.

First, the ConfigureJNI module doesn’t successfully configure the JNI on
my system because it was expecting to find `JAVA_HOME` in .., so I added
a little code to notice if it’s failing to find a place where `jni.h`
exists.  (And on my system I did `export
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64` before running it, but your
pathnames will vary.)  There was a hardcoded pathname in SConscript,
presumably as an interim debugging measure, which I removed.  A
reasonable default to try on Debian-derived systems such as Ubuntu and
LinuxMint might be `/usr/lib/jvm/default-java`, but I didn’t implement
that.

Second, in SConscript, the JNI include directories were being stuck into
a `javaenv` SCons environment object, which was used to build the Java
classes providing the Java interfaces to Hammer, but not the C files
containing the native methods themselves.  Consequently the compiler
couldn’t find the JDK JNI headers when it tried to compile the C code
into a shared library.  It might make sense to use `javaenv` to compile
that shared library, but in case it doesn’t, I cloned the default
environment with an extra include directory.

I hope this is soon enough to be helpful!