Skip to content

sailorw/Mach7

 
 

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

Mach7: Pattern Matching for C++ Build Status: Linux, OSX Build Status: Windows

by Yuriy Solodkyy, Gabriel Dos Reis, Bjarne Stroustrup

Abstract

Pattern matching is an abstraction mechanism that can greatly simplify source code. Commonly, pattern matching is built into a language to provide better syntax, faster code, correctness guarantees and improved diagnostics. Mach7 is a library solution to pattern matching in C++ that maintains many of these features. All the patterns in Mach7 are user-definable, can be stored in variables, passed among functions, and allow the use of open class hierarchies.

Mach7 by Example

Fibonacci numbers demonstrates the use of patterns with built-in types in Mach7:

// Fibonacci numbers
int fib(int n)
{
    var<int> m;

    Match(n)
    {
      Case(1)     return 1;
      Case(2)     return 1;
      Case(2*m)   return sqr(fib(m+1)) - sqr(fib(m-1));
      Case(2*m+1) return sqr(fib(m+1)) + sqr(fib(m));
    }
    EndMatch
}

Lambda calculator demonstrates use of pattern matching to decompose objects and nested patterns:

// Lambda calculator
struct Term       { virtual ~Term() {}     };
struct Var : Term { std::string name;      };
struct Abs : Term { Var&  var;  Term& body;};
struct App : Term { Term& func; Term& arg; };

Term* eval(Term* t)
{
    var<const Var&> v; 
    var<const Term&> b,a;

    Match(*t)
    {
      Case(C<Var>())               return &match0;
      Case(C<Abs>())               return &match0;
      Case(C<App>(C<Abs>(v,b),a))  return eval(subs(b,v,a));
      Otherwise() cerr << "error"; return nullptr ;
    } 
    EndMatch
}

It can also be used to demonstrate relational matching on several arguments:

bool operator==(const Term& left, const Term& right)
{
    var<std::string> s;
    var<const Term&> v,t,f;

    Match(left,right)
    {
      Case(C<Var>(s),     C<Var>(+s)     ) return true;
      Case(C<Abs>(&v,&t), C<Abs>(&+v,&+t)) return true;
      Case(C<App>(&f,&t), C<App>(&+f,&+t)) return true;
      Otherwise()                          return false;
    }
    EndMatch

    return false; // To prevent all control path warning
}

Next example demonstrates that the library can deal efficiently and in a type-safe manner with non-polymorphic classes like boost::variant as well.

void print(const boost::variant<double,float,int>& v)
{
    var<double> d; var<float> f; var<int> n;

    Match(v)
    {
      Case(C<double>(d)) cout << "double " << d << endl; break;
      Case(C<float> (f)) cout << "float  " << f << endl; break;
      Case(C<int>   (n)) cout << "int    " << n << endl; break;
    }
    EndMatch
}

Breve syntax is not the only thing Mach7 has to offer - the generated code is faster than Visitors!

For a more detailed set of examples, have a look at the code that was prepared for CppCon 2014 presentation, and implemented using visitors as well as pattern matching. These are simple enough to help you get started on your own Mach7 project.

Continuous Integration

We use Travis CI and AppVeyor for continuous integration and currently have all check-ins validated in the following configurations:

Build Status G++ Clang
Linux 4.8 3.4
OSX 4.8 3.5

Building sources

If you haven't done so yet, get a copy of this Git repo locally by executing:

git clone https://github.com/solodon4/Mach7.git

The library itself is header only and does not require building. To build unit and timing tests we've accumulated over time several scripts, which we don't completely abandon in favor of newer ones as they maintain the flags the original experiments on the library were built with.

Using CMake (3.2 or later)

CMake support is the most recent and is still very experimental at this point. To build with cmake, perform the following commands from within Mach7 folder:

cd code/test
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

Version 3.2 is needed in order to be able to have support of target_compile_features for AppleClang

Using Makefiles for GCC (4.4 or later) or Clang (3.3 or later)

Top-level Makefile synopisis:

make         - build all library tests
make all     - same as above right now
make unit    - build all unit tests
make time    - build all timing tests
make cmpl    - build all tests for timing the compilation times of the library
make clean   - clean all built targets and intermediaries
make test    - run all the built tests
make check   - run those tests for which there are correct_output/*.out files and check that the output is the same
make doc     - build Mach7 documentation (requires doxygen)
make includes.png - build graph representation of header inclusions (requires graphviz dot)

To see a list of more specific targets supported by other makefiles, see comments inside them.

To build a particular file, say test/unit/example05.cpp, build a target with the same filename and extension .exe instead of .cpp (even on Unix family OS). For example:

cd $MACH7_ROOT/code/test/unit
make example05.exe

Lower-level makefiles support most of the phony targets of the top-level makefile, to which the top-level makefile forwards the corresponding calls. For example:

To build and run just the unit tests:

cd $MACH7_ROOT/code/test/unit
make
make check
make test

Similarly, to build and run all the timing tests:

cd $MACH7_ROOT/code/test/time
make
make test

Using Visual C++ (2010 or later)

Mach7 uses its own build.bat script to build all the examples and unit tests that come with it. The script assumes each .cpp file to be a standalone program. You can find the most up-to-date list of supported commands by running:

build.bat /?
Syntax:
build [ pgo | repro | tmp | <ver> ] [ filemask*.cpp ... ]
build [ syntax | timing | cmp | doc | clean | test | check ]
Commands supported so far:
build [ pgo | repro | tmp | <ver> | <arch> ] [ filemask*.cpp ... ] - build given C++ files
build        - Build all examples using the most recent MS Visual C++ compiler installed
build unit   - Build all unit tests
build syntax - Build all supported library options combination for syntax variations
build timing - Build all supported library options combination for timing variations
build cmp    - Build all executables for comparison with other languages
build doc    - Build Mach7 documentation
build clean  - Clean all built examples
build test   - Run all built examples
build check  - Run those examples for which there are correct_output/*.out files and 
               check that output is the same
Modifiers:
       pgo   - Perform Profile-Guided Optimization on produced executables
       repro - In case of error, create and compile a pre-processed repro
       tmp   - Keep temporaries
      <ver>  - Use a specific version of Visual C++ to compiler the source 
               code. <ver> can be one of the following:
                - 2016 - Visual C++ 15.0
                - 2015 - Visual C++ 14.0
                - 2013 - Visual C++ 12.0
                - 2012 - Visual C++ 11.0
                - 2010 - Visual C++ 10.0
                - 2008 - Visual C++  9.0
                - 2005 - Visual C++  8.0
                - 2003 - Visual C++  7.1
                  0000 - Do not use any VS to set up the environment, I will set it up by myself
      <arch> - Target architecture. Can be one of the following: x86, x64, arm

Talks

Publications

License

Mach7 is licensed under the BSD License.

Support

Please contact Yuriy Solodkyy with any questions regarding Mach7.

Call for Help

We are looking for contributors to the project. If you are a student taking a programming languages class or any other class that would require you to write a small compiler or interpreter, we would love you try Mach7 for the job. We promise to help with any issues you might have with the library.

Known bugs and limitations

Right now, there are several experimental headers that one would need to include to enable one or the other syntax to work. This is a work in progress, so before you start working with a particular syntax, check examples with that syntax and make note of which of headers they include. We will clear this eventually leaving only one header, but at the moment it is a mess, and the most intuitive match.hpp is probably not the header you want as it represents older experiments. The most recent experimentation and the header you are prpobably looking for is mach7/type_switchN-patterns-xtl.hpp.

The library is not yet suitable for multi-threaded environment. Lock-free version of vtbl-map is in the works.

Please refrain from using solution or project files checked in here. They are not in sync with most recent changes to directory structure and are difficult to maintain. They will ultimately be replaced with a less verbose system (likely CMake), and in the meantime please use build.bat to build tests on Windows.

The following files crash GCC 4.4.5 on my Fedora 13 box: extractor.cpp, shape2.cpp, shape4.cpp, shape5.cpp, shape6.cpp, shape.cpp, numbers.cpp, category.cpp, exp.cpp If they do on yours too, just delete them, they are all test cases anyways.

For the most up-to-date list of known issues see Mach7 Issues.

About

Pattern-matching library for C++

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Languages

  • C++ 43.7%
  • TeX 33.2%
  • HTML 19.3%
  • Makefile 1.5%
  • Batchfile 1.2%
  • Haskell 0.3%
  • Other 0.8%