A guide to how rustc works and how to contribute to it.
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bors fb2f5df411 Auto merge of #135272 - BoxyUwU:generic_arg_infer_reliability_2, r=compiler-errors
Forbid usage of `hir` `Infer` const/ty variants in ambiguous contexts

The feature `generic_arg_infer` allows providing `_` as an argument to const generics in order to infer them. This introduces a syntactic ambiguity as to whether generic arguments are type or const arguments. In order to get around this we introduced a fourth `GenericArg` variant, `Infer` used to represent `_` as an argument to generic parameters when we don't know if its a type or a const argument.

This made hir visitors that care about `TyKind::Infer` or `ConstArgKind::Infer` very error prone as checking for `TyKind::Infer`s in  `visit_ty` would find *some* type infer arguments but not *all* of them as they would sometimes be lowered to `GenericArg::Infer` instead.

Additionally the `visit_infer` method would previously only visit `GenericArg::Infer` not *all* infers (e.g. `TyKind::Infer`), this made it very easy to override `visit_infer` and expect it to visit all infers when in reality it would only visit *some* infers.

---

This PR aims to fix those issues by making the `TyKind` and `ConstArgKind` types generic over whether the infer types/consts are represented by `Ty/ConstArgKind::Infer` or out of line (e.g. by a `GenericArg::Infer` or accessible by overiding `visit_infer`). We then make HIR Visitors convert all const args and types to the versions where infer vars are stored out of line and call `visit_infer` in cases where a `Ty`/`Const` would previously have had a `Ty/ConstArgKind::Infer` variant:

API Summary
```rust
enum AmbigArg {}

enum Ty/ConstArgKind<Unambig = ()> {
   ...
   Infer(Unambig),
}

impl Ty/ConstArg {
  fn try_as_ambig_ty/ct(self) -> Option<Ty/ConstArg<AmbigArg>>;
}
impl Ty/ConstArg<AmbigArg> {
  fn as_unambig_ty/ct(self) -> Ty/ConstArg;
}

enum InferKind {
  Ty(Ty),
  Const(ConstArg),
  Ambig(InferArg),
}

trait Visitor {
  ...
  fn visit_ty/const_arg(&mut self, Ty/ConstArg<AmbigArg>) -> Self::Result;
  fn visit_infer(&mut self, id: HirId, sp: Span, kind: InferKind) -> Self::Result;
}

// blanket impl'd, not meant to be overriden
trait VisitorExt {
  fn visit_ty/const_arg_unambig(&mut self, Ty/ConstArg) -> Self::Result;
}

fn walk_unambig_ty/const_arg(&mut V, Ty/ConstArg) -> Self::Result;
fn walk_ty/const_arg(&mut V, Ty/ConstArg<AmbigArg>) -> Self::Result;
```

The end result is that `visit_infer` visits *all* infer args and is also the *only* way to visit an infer arg, `visit_ty` and `visit_const_arg` can now no longer encounter a `Ty/ConstArgKind::Infer`. Representing this in the type system means that it is now very difficult to mess things up, either accessing `TyKind::Infer` "just works" and you won't miss *some* type infers- or it doesn't work and you have to look at `visit_infer` or some `GenericArg::Infer` which forces you to think about the full complexity involved.

Unfortunately there is no lint right now about explicitly matching on uninhabited variants, I can't find the context for why this is the case 🤷‍♀️

I'm not convinced the framing of un/ambig ty/consts is necessarily the right one but I'm not sure what would be better. I somewhat like calling them full/partial types based on the fact that `Ty<Partial>`/`Ty<Full>` directly specifies how many of the type kinds are actually represented compared to `Ty<Ambig>` which which leaves that to the reader to figure out based on the logical consequences of it the type being in an ambiguous position.

---

tool changes have been modified in their own commits for easier reviewing by anyone getting cc'd from subtree changes. I also attempted to split out "bug fixes arising from the refactoring" into their own commit so they arent lumped in with a big general refactor commit

Fixes #112110
2025-01-24 11:12:01 +00:00
.github/workflows Opt into, rather than out of, linkcheck (#2180) 2024-12-30 17:22:22 +08:00
ci Opt into, rather than out of, linkcheck (#2180) 2024-12-30 17:22:22 +08:00
examples Remove RunCompiler 2025-01-23 09:38:58 +00:00
josh-sync Add tooling for performing Josh synces (#2183) 2025-01-05 17:51:45 +01:00
src Rollup merge of #135489 - RalfJung:TryFromSliceError, r=tgross35 2025-01-24 08:08:06 +01:00
.editorconfig Set max line length in `.editorconfig` to 100 (#1788) 2023-09-05 23:24:59 +09:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: Mark minified javascript as binary to filter greps 2022-10-07 18:34:51 +02:00
.gitignore Remove properly tracked config file from .gitignore & add support for skipping of link-checking (#2023) 2024-12-29 13:23:49 -08:00
.mailmap add a mailmap 2023-12-17 18:21:38 +01:00
CITATION.cff Add a citation file 2023-02-11 08:41:56 +02:00
CNAME cname (#606) 2020-03-09 18:10:52 -03:00
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md Fix some links (#1865) 2024-01-28 19:44:41 -03:00
LICENSE-APACHE add code-of-conduct, licensing material, and a README 2018-01-16 16:36:21 -05:00
LICENSE-MIT add code-of-conduct, licensing material, and a README 2018-01-16 16:36:21 -05:00
README.md Add tooling for performing Josh synces (#2183) 2025-01-05 17:51:45 +01:00
book.toml Add a couple of linkcheck exceptions: (#2120) 2024-12-29 12:58:21 -08:00
mermaid-init.js add mdbook-mermaid 2022-07-17 23:34:12 +02:00
mermaid.min.js add mdbook-mermaid 2022-07-17 23:34:12 +02:00
rust-version Preparing for merge from rustc 2025-01-05 18:12:52 +01:00
triagebot.toml Allow anyone to change the status of a PR 2020-10-04 10:27:58 -04:00

README.md

CI

This is a collaborative effort to build a guide that explains how rustc works. The aim of the guide is to help new contributors get oriented to rustc, as well as to help more experienced folks in figuring out some new part of the compiler that they haven't worked on before.

You can read the latest version of the guide here.

You may also find the rustdocs for the compiler itself useful. Note that these are not intended as a guide; it's recommended that you search for the docs you're looking for instead of reading them top to bottom.

For documentation on developing the standard library, see std-dev-guide.

Contributing to the guide

The guide is useful today, but it has a lot of work still to go.

If you'd like to help improve the guide, we'd love to have you! You can find plenty of issues on the issue tracker. Just post a comment on the issue you would like to work on to make sure that we don't accidentally duplicate work. If you think something is missing, please open an issue about it!

In general, if you don't know how the compiler works, that is not a problem! In that case, what we will do is to schedule a bit of time for you to talk with someone who does know the code, or who wants to pair with you and figure it out. Then you can work on writing up what you learned.

In general, when writing about a particular part of the compiler's code, we recommend that you link to the relevant parts of the rustc rustdocs.

Build Instructions

To build a local static HTML site, install mdbook with:

> cargo install mdbook mdbook-linkcheck2 mdbook-toc mdbook-mermaid

and execute the following command in the root of the repository:

> mdbook build --open

The build files are found in the book/html directory.

We use mdbook-linkcheck2 to validate URLs included in our documentation. Link checking is not run by default locally, though it is in CI. To enable it locally, set the environment variable ENABLE_LINKCHECK=1 like in the following example.

$ ENABLE_LINKCHECK=1 mdbook serve

Table of Contents

We use mdbook-toc to auto-generate TOCs for long sections. You can invoke the preprocessor by including the <!-- toc --> marker at the place where you want the TOC.

Synchronizing josh subtree with rustc

This repository is linked to rust-lang/rust as a josh subtree. You can use the following commands to synchronize the subtree in both directions.

Pull changes from rust-lang/rust into this repository

  1. Checkout a new branch that will be used to create a PR into rust-lang/rustc-dev-guide
  2. Run the pull command
    $ cargo run --manifest-path josh-sync/Cargo.toml rustc-pull
    
  3. Push the branch to your fork and create a PR into rustc-dev-guide

Push changes from this repository into rust-lang/rust

  1. Run the push command to create a branch named <branch-name> in a rustc fork under the <gh-username> account
    $ cargo run --manifest-path josh-sync/Cargo.toml rustc-push <branch-name> <gh-username>
    
  2. Create a PR from <branch-name> into rust-lang/rust