Honest to a Segfault

roc recently posted a thought-provoking entry titled, "Coding Style as a Failure of Language Design", in which he states:

Languages already make rules about syntax that are somewhat arbitrary. Projects imposing additional syntax restrictions indicate that the language did not constrain the syntax enough; if the language syntax was sufficiently constrained, projects would not feel the need to do it. Syntax would be uniform within and across projects, and developers would not need to learn multiple variants of the same language.

I totally agree with roc’s point that there is overhead in learning-and-conforming-to local style guidelines. I also agree that this overhead is unnecessary and that language implementers should find ways to eliminate it; however, I think that imposing additional arbitrary constraints on the syntax is heading in the wrong direction.

Your language’s execution engine [*] already has a method of normalizing crazy styles: it forms an abstract syntax tree. Before the abstract syntax tree (AST) is mutated [†] it is in perfect correspondence with the original source text, modulo the infinite number of possible formatting preferences. This is the necessary set of constraints on the syntax that can actually result in your program being executed as it is written. [‡]

So, why don’t we just lug that thing around instead of the source text itself?

Hyperbolic analogy: Saying, “You shouldn’t need to wrap the web service interface, because it already provides an API,” is like saying, “You shouldn’t need different programming languages, because they’re all Turing complete.”

Web services tend to deliver raw data payloads from a flat interface and thus lack the usability of native language APIs. Inevitably, when you program RPC-like interfaces for no language in particular, you incur incompatibilities for every particular language’s best practices, idioms, and data models. [*] The issue of appropriately representing exceptions and/or error codes in RPC-like services is a notorious example of this.

There are additional specification mechanisms like WSDL [@] that allow us to make the payloads more object-like. Additional structure is indicated through the use of user-defined “complex types,” but this only gets you part of the way to a usable API for any given language. In Python, it’s a lot more sensible to perform an operation like in the following abstraction:

from internal_tracker.service import InternalTracker
bug_serivce = InternalTracker(username=getpass.getuser(),
    password=getpass.getpass())
bug = bug_service.get_bug(123456)
bug.actionable.add('Chris Leary') # may raise ReadOnlyException
comment = Comment(text='Adding self to actionable')
bug.arbs.add_comment(comment)
bug.save() # may raise instanceof ServiceWriteException

Than to use an external web service API solution directly (despite using the excellent Suds library):

# Boilerplate
client = suds.client.Client(wsdl=wsdl_uri)
security = suds.wsse.Security()
security.tokens.append(UsernameToken(getpass.getuser(),
    getpass.getpass()))
client.set_options(wsse=security)
internal_tracker_service = client.service
 
# Usage
service_bug = internal_tracker_service.GetBug(123456)
service_bug.actionable += ', Chris Leary'
# Do we check the response for all WebFault exceptions?
# (Do we check for and handle all the possible transport issues?)
internal_tracker_service.UpdateBug(service_bug)
Comment = internal_tracker_service.factory['Comment']
comment = Comment()
comment.BugId = service_bug.Id
comment.Text = 'Adding self to actionable'
# Again, what should we check?
internal_tracker_service.AddComment(comment)

Why is it good to have the layer of indirection?

Lemma 1: The former example actually reads like Python code. It raises problem-domain-relevant exceptions, uses keyword arguments appropriately, follows language naming conventions, and uses sensible language-specific data types that may be poorly represented in the web service. For example, actionable may be a big comma-delimited string according to the service, whereas it should clearly be modeled as a set of (unique) names, using Python’s set data type. Another example is BigIntegers being poorly represented as strings in order to keep the API language-neutral.

Lemma 2: The layer represents an extremely maintainable abstraction barrier between the client and the backing service. Should a team using the abstraction decide it’s prudent to switch to, say, Bugzilla, I would have no trouble writing a port for the backing service in which all client code would continue to work. Another example is a scenario in which we determine that the transport is unreliable for some reason, so decide all requests should be retried three times instead of one. [!] How many places will I need to make changes? How many client code bases do I potentially need to keep track of?

Why is it risky to use the web service interface?

If the web service API represents the problem domain correctly with constructs that make sense for your language, it’s fine to use directly. (As long as you’re confident you won’t have transport-layer issues.) If you’re near-certain that the backing service will not change, and/or you’re willing to risk all the client code that will depend on that API directly being instantaneously broken, it’s fine. The trouble occurs when one of these is not the case.

Let’s say that the backing service does change to Bugzilla. Chances are that hacking in adapter classes for the new service would be a horrible upgrade experience that entails:

1. Repeated discovery of leaky abstractions,
2. Greater propensity to bugs, [^] and
3. More difficult maintenance going forward.

Client code that is tightly coupled to the service API would force a rewrite in order to avoid these issues.

Pragmatic Programming says to rely on reliable things, which is a rule that any reasonable person will agree with. [&] The abstraction barrier is reliable in its loose coupling (direct modeling of the problem domain), whereas direct use of the web service API could force a reliance on quirky external service facts, perhaps deep into client code.

Is there room for compromise?

This is the point in the discussion where we think something along the lines of, “Well, I can just fix the quirky things with a bunch of shims between my code and the service itself.” At that point, I contend, you’re really just implementing a half-baked version of the language-specific API. It’s better to make the abstractions appropriate for the target language and problem domain the first time around than by incrementally adding shims and hoping client code didn’t use the underlying quirks before you got to them. Heck, if the web service is extremely well suited to your language, you’ll end up proxying most of the time anyway, and the development will be relatively effortless. [$]

What about speed of deployment?

If we have language-specific APIs, won’t there be additional delay waiting for it to update when additional capabilities are added to the backing service?

First of all, if the new capability is not within the problem domain of the library, it should be a separate API. This is the single responsibility principle applied to interfaces — you should be programming to an interface abstraction. Just because a backing service has a hodgepodge of responsibilities doesn’t mean that our language-specific API should as well. In fact, it probably shouldn’t. Let’s assume it is in the problem domain.

If the functionality is sane and ready for use in the target language, it should be really simple for the library owner to extend the language-specific API. In fact, if you’re using the proxy pattern, you may not have to do anything at all. Let’s assume that the functionality is quirky and you’re blocked waiting for the library owner to update with the language-specific shim, because it’s non-trivial.

Now our solution tends to vary based on the language. Languages like Python have what’s known as “gentlemen’s privacy”, based on the notion of a gentlemen’s agreement. Privacy constraints are not enforced at compile-time and/or run-time, so you can just reach through the abstraction barrier if you believe you know what you’re doing. Yes, you’re making an informed decision to violate encapsulation. Cases like this are exactly when it comes in handy.

assert not hasattr(bug_service, 'super_new_method_we_need')
# HACK: Violate abstraction -- we need this new capability right now
# and Billy-Bo, the library owner, is swamped!
suds_client = bug_service._suds_client
result = suds_client.SuperNewMethodWeNeed()
target_result = de_quirkify(result)

As you can see, we end up implementing the method de_quirkify to de-quirk the quirky web service result into a more language-specific data model — it’s bad form to make the code dependent on the web service’s quirky output form. We then submit our code for this method to the library owner and suggest that they use it as a basis for their implementation, so that a) they can get it done faster, and b) we can seamlessly factor the hack out.

For privacy-enforcing languages, you would need to expose a public API for getting at the private service, then tell people not to use it unless they know what they’re doing. As you can tell, you pretty much wind up with gentlemen’s privacy on that interface, anyway.

Footnotes

[*] In EE we call this kind of phenomenon an impedance mismatch, which results in power loss.
[@] And many others, with few successful ones.
[!] Or maybe we want to switch from HTTP transport to SMTP. Yes, this is actually possible. :-)
[^] In duplicating exact web service behaviors — you have to be backwards compatible with whichever behaviors the existing client code relies on.
[&] It’s a syntactic tautology. The caveat is that reasonable people will almost certainly quibble over the classification of what’s reliable.
[$] At least in Python or other languages with a good degree of dynamism, it will.

Disclaimer

Bit twiddling is fun. Plus, it has several advantages:

• It gives you a greater understanding of the nuances of the (C) language. As we all know, learning C is important. If you’re a computer engineer and have weak C-fu, then it is time, grasshopper.
• Bit twiddling is important to know if you’re ever going to write software in the field of computer engineering. Without a good understanding of how to slice-and-dice primitive data types, your simulations will be significantly more prone to error. Trust me, you don’t want to use gdb for hours only to find that your shift value was off by one. Not that I’ve ever done that.
• It makes you feel smart, like when you’re the only person who knows the secret to your party trick. I don’t know what that’s like personally, of course, because I spend all my party time bit bashing, but I hear it’s similar.

You have to understand, though, that clever tricks without appropriate documentation will make people want to break your face. [#] Always bit bash responsibly: appoint a designated code-reader to make sure you’re clear enough, and leave your keys at the door.

The Problem

Let’s say you wanted to know whether a number was a valid PCI Express link width in terms of number of lanes. We know that valid widths are x1, x2, x4, x8, x12, x16, or x32, and want to construct a function of the following form:

#include <stdbool.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <assert.h>
 
/**
 * :return: Whether the lane count is valid.
 */
bool is_valid_link_width(uint8_t lane_count);
 
/**
 * Unit test for ``is_valid_link_width``.
 */
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    assert(!is_valid_link_width(0));
    assert(is_valid_link_width(1));
    assert(is_valid_link_width(2));
    assert(!is_valid_link_width(3));
    assert(is_valid_link_width(32));
    assert(!is_valid_link_width(33));
    assert(!is_valid_link_width(33));
    assert(!is_valid_link_width(0xff));
    return 0;
}

Note that the uint8_t has a width of exactly 8 bits. [%]

How would you write it?

Less Interesting Solution

If you were thinking switch statement, that will work. You could use a switch statement with intentional fall-throughs and hope that the compiler optimizes a branch table for you. (For values this small and dense it probably will, as mentioned in the referenced article.) If the compiler doesn’t write the branch table for you, but instead generates the equivalent of a big if/else if ladder, your solution doesn’t satisfy the O(1) constraint: in that case, the worst case control flow hits every rung of the ladder (the else if guards), making it O(n).

bool is_valid_link_width(uint8_t lane_count) {
    switch (lane_count) {
    case 1:
    case 2:
    case 4:
    case 8:
    case 12:
    case 16:
    case 32:
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}

An implementation that I like better, which doesn’t put as much faith in the compiler, is as follows:

bool is_valid_link_width(uint8_t lane_count) {
    return 0x100011116ULL & (1ULL << lane_count);
}

How cool is that?

The Neat Trick

The clever insight here is that we can encode all of our target “true” values in binary form, like so:

       32                      16    12    8     4    1
0b__0001__0000__0000__0000__0001__0001__0001__0001__0110

Now, if we were to take a 1 value and move it over a number of binary slots equal to the lane count, it will line up with a 1 value in this long binary number we’ve constructed. Take the bitwise-AND of those two values, and we wind up with:

• A non-zero (true) value if they line up, OR
• A zero value if they don’t

This is exactly what we were looking for.

This long binary number we’ve created must be converted from binary into a hexadecimal value, so that we can represent it as an integer literal in our C program. Encoding each binary 4-tuple into hex from right to left, we get the value 0x100011116.

There’s an issue with this value, however. Unless we specify a suffix for our integer literal, the compiler is allowed to truncate the value to its native word size, [*] which would cause serious problems. For x86 systems with 16 bit words, our value could be truncated to 0×1116, which would only allow lane sizes of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 12 — the allowed values of 16 and 32 would be cut off!

To solve this, as you can see in the function definition, we add the ULL integer suffix, which explicitly marks the integer literal as an unsigned long long. (The long long integer data type was added to the C language in the C99 standard.) This data type is required to be at least 64 bits wide, so it can definitely hold our 33 relevant bits (32 plus the zero bit which is there for the 1ULL << 0 case). The long data type is too small to hold this value, as long can potentially be only 32 bits wide per the C standard (and it is 32 bits wide on most modern machines).

Readability Counts

Note that there’s a more readable version of the same trick in the following:

bool is_valid_link_width(uint8_t lane_count) {
    const uint64_t set =
        1ULL << 1
        | 1ULL << 2
        | 1ULL << 4
        | 1ULL << 8
        | 1ULL << 12
        | 1ULL << 16
        | 1ULL << 32;
    return set & (1ULL << lane_count);
}

Here we make the construction of the big integer more explicit and make the code less prone to our errors in encoding the literal binary value into hex. Any compiler worth its salt will fold out the const calculation at compile time, so no overhead will be incurred for writing it this way.

I demonstrated the other way of doing it first to: a) blow your mind a little bit, and b) demonstrate an idiom you might see in other people’s (overly) clever code. Now there’s a chance you can recognize and decipher it without adequate documentation. Huzzah!

Footnotes

[#] A great rift in the universe known as “Other People’s Perl” has been the cause of 80% of the computer-engineering face breakage since 1987. Don’t let this tragedy happen to you or your beloved programmers.
[%] I like using fixed-width integer types, especially in describing problems, because they helpfully constrain the possibilities on the input domain. This is even more important for newcomers who are just wrapping their heads around bit twiddling.
[*] I can’t find standards documents/discussions to support this claim, but it’s definitely what I was taught. Can anybody provide evidence to confirm/deny?

It seems like g++ uses the order indicated in the class’ derivation list over the order indicated in the base specifier list, as in the below example:

#include <iostream>
 
using namespace std;
 
class Animal {
public:
    Animal() {
        cout < < "Animal!" << endl;
    }
};
 
class Man : public virtual Animal {
public:
    Man(string exclamation) {
        cout << "Man " << exclamation << "!" << endl;
    }
};
 
class Bear : public virtual Animal {
public:
    Bear(string exclamation) {
        cout << "Bear " << exclamation << "!" << endl;
    }
};
 
class Pig : public virtual Animal {
public:
    Pig(string exclamation) {
        cout << "Pig " << exclamation << "!" &lt;&lt; endl;
    }
};
 
class ManBearPig : public Man, public Bear, public Pig {
public:
    ManBearPig(string exclamation)
        : Pig(exclamation), Bear(exclamation), Man(exclamation)
    {
        cout << "ManBearPig " << exclamation << "!" << endl;
    }
};
 
int main() {
    ManBearPig mbp("away");
    return 0;
}

cdleary@gamma:~/projects/sandbox/sandbox_cpp$ g++ diamond.cpp && ./a.out
Animal!
Man away!
Bear away!
Pig away!
ManBearPig away!

Note that this experiment is a pretty (very) weak basis for the conclusion — it could be using lexicographic order, order based on the day of month, or any number of other unlikely heuristics :) A lot more experimentation is necessary before getting a discernible pattern, but I just felt like messing around.

Edit (07/27/08): Using correct “base specifier list” terminology instead of my made-up “class initializer list” terminology.

In the following, jenkinsInt is a function that uses no references — it takes an integer, calculates the Jenkins One-at-a-time hash code on a number of bytes corresponding to its width, and returns that value as an integer. Pretty simple, all in all.

Standard ML of New Jersey v110.54 [built: Sat Sep 24 16:19:34 2005]
val jenkinsInt = fn : int -> int
- jenkinsInt(4);
jenkinsInt: 4
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Segfault!? Clearly this is a failure of the runtime, so I turned to version .62, which is known to be slower:

Standard ML of New Jersey v110.62 [built: Wed May  9 18:06:38 2007]
val jenkinsInt = fn : int -> int
- jenkinsInt(4);
jenkinsInt: 4
uncaught exception Overflow [overflow]
raised at: file stdin

At least we get a nice error message in the newer version. It was a lot easier to fix the error once I knew what was really happening.

For kicks, here’s my (fixed) implementation. I don’t guarantee its correctness — I wrote it hastily for a class project.

structure Hashes = struct
  val () = if Word.wordSize <> Option.valOf(Int.precision)
           then print("WARNING: unexpected int size\n")
           else ()
 
  val maxIntInverse = if Int.maxInt = NONE then ~1
                      else ~1 * Option.valOf(Int.maxInt)
 
  (* I'm not sure how much optimization the compiler does, so I'm precomputing
   * these values -- they're quite frequently used if a lot of hashing is being
   * done. *)
  val zero = Word.fromInt(0)
  val three = Word.fromInt(3)
  val six = Word.fromInt(6)
  val eight = Word.fromInt(8)
  val ten = Word.fromInt(10)
  val eleven = Word.fromInt(11)
  val fifteen = Word.fromInt(15)
  val sixteen = Word.fromInt(16)
  val twenty_four = Word.fromInt(24)
  val two_hundred_fifty_five = Word.fromInt(255)
 
  fun jenkinsByte(key:Word.word, hash:Word.word):Word.word =
    let
      val hash = hash + key
      val hash = hash + Word.<<(hash, ten)
      val hash = Word.xorb(hash, Word.>>(hash, six))
    in
      hash
    end
 
  fun jenkinsChar(key:char, hash:Word.word):Word.word =
    let val key = Word.fromInt(Char.ord(key)) in
      jenkinsByte(key, hash)
    end
 
  fun jenkinsFinish(hash:Word.word):int =
    let
      val hash = hash + Word.<<(hash, three)
      val hash = Word.xorb(hash, Word.>>(hash, eleven))
      val hash = hash + Word.<<(hash, fifteen)
      val result = Word.toIntX(hash)
      val result = if result < maxIntInverse then maxIntInverse else result
    in
      Int.abs(result)
    end
 
  fun jenkinsChars(cs:char list):int =
    let
      val hash = zero
      val hash = List.foldl(jenkinsChar)(hash)(cs)
      val result = Word.toIntX(hash)
      val result = if result < maxIntInverse then maxIntInverse else result
      val absResult = Int.abs(result)
    in
      absResult
    end
 
  fun jenkinsInt(i:int):int =
    let
      val w = Word.fromInt(i)
      val b1 = Word.andb(w, two_hundred_fifty_five)
      val b2 = Word.>>(w, eight)
      val b3 = Word.>>(w, sixteen)
      val b4 = Word.>>(w, twenty_four)
      val hash = List.foldl(jenkinsByte)(zero)([b1, b2, b3, b4])
    in
      jenkinsFinish(hash)
    end
 
  fun jenkinsString(s:string):int = jenkinsChars(String.explode(s))
end