ADR003: Interface to visit Internal Representation components

Summary

We are introducing an interface using the visitor pattern  (from Design Patterns  GoF book) to allow easy access of arbitrary IR components without the need to manipulate the entire IR. This should avoid significant occurrences of boilerplating throughout quint source code and possibly external libraries built on top of it.

Context

Quint’s internal representation has many heterogeneous recursive structures. For example, a module can contain an operator definition with a let-in expression, which contains yet another operator definition and a body expression. Therefore, if we want to define a procedure to extract information of a specific type of expression (i.e. name expressions to resolve names), we have to recurse on all this structures looking for expressions in every possible component they can appear on.

Options

Taking inspiration on Kotlin’s KSP , which provides an interface to manipulate Kotlin’s AST. From its library, we could find two options:

1. Define functions to extract components from the IR/AST, that is, findExpressions(myModule) would return a list of expressions including nested ones.

• Pros:
  • more functional style, a standard we are trying to implement.
• Cons:
  • Being a stateless model, it could be significantly inefficient. Unless we use some caching, every call of findSomething() will explore the whole AST. And if we use caching, we are losing the statelessness that makes it good in the first place.

1. Define an interface (in the OOP sense) with methods to access each component, and a procedure that calls these methods accordingly. This is known as the visitor pattern .

• Pros:
  • It is a known pattern, so it will be familiar to some people and has a lot of online resources with great explanations to those who aren’t
  • It’s efficient in the sense that only one IR navigation is enough to execute however many procedures
  • We already use this pattern in our parser, since the antlr4ts  library provides an interface to define visitors to the parsed AST.
• Cons:
  • Implementation relies on classes, and classes in typescript are discouraged. Although this seems more like a “know how to use” than “don’t use” recommendation, is still something to be considered.

Solution

We choose to go with the visitor pattern approach because it seems like a better solution overall, despite being an exception to our functional-style standard. For this pattern, we define an interface with visit* methods for all IR components. Perhaps sometime in the future we will want to differentiate pre and post order with enter* and exit* methods, but that’s an easy refactor.

export interface IRVisitor {
  visitExpr?: (expr: QuintEx) => void
  visitDef?: (def: QuintDef) => void
 
  visitConst?: (cons: QuintConst) => void
 
  visitName?: (nameExpr: QuintName) => void
  visitApp?: (appExpr: QuintApp) => void
 
  visitTypeVar?: (typeVar: QuintTypeVar) => void
  visitTypeConst?: (typeConst: QuintTypeConst) => void
 
  // ...
}

We also have to define functions to explore the IR and call the visit* methods at their corresponding components.

 
export function walkModule (visitor: IRVisitor, quintModule: QuintModule): void {
  quintModule.defs.forEach(def => walkDefinition(visitor, def))
}
 
function walkDefinition (visitor: IRVisitor, def: QuintDef) {
  if (visitor.visitDef) {
    visitor.visitDef(def)
  }
 
  switch (def.kind) {
    case 'const':
      if (visitor.visitConst) {
        visitor.visitConst(def)
      }
      if (def.type) {
        walkType(visitor, def.type)
      }
      break
 
    // ...
  }
}
 
function walkExpression (visitor: IRVisitor, expr: QuintEx) { ... }
 
function walkType (visitor: IRVisitor, quintType: QuintType) { ... }

This is the underlying infrastructure. To use it, one has to simply define a visitor class with methods to visit relevant components.

class NameResolverVisitor implements IRVisitor {
  constructor (table: DefinitionTable, scopeTree: ScopeTree) {
    this.table = table
    this.scopeTree = scopeTree
  }
 
  results: NameResolutionResult[] = []
 
  private table: DefinitionTable = { valueDefinitions: [], typeDefinitions: [] }
  private scopeTree: ScopeTree
 
  visitName (nameExpr: QuintName): void {
    // This is a name expression, the name must be defined
    // either globally or under a scope that contains the expression
    const valueDefinitionsForScope = filterScope(this.table.valueDefinitions, scopesForId(this.scopeTree, nameExpr.id))
 
    if (!valueDefinitionsForScope.some(name => name.identifier === nameExpr.name)) {
      this.results.push({
        kind: 'error',
        errors: [{ kind: 'value', name: nameExpr.name, definitionName: 'defName', reference: nameExpr.id }],
      })
    }
  }
 
  visitApp (appExpr: QuintApp): void { ... }
 
  visitTypeVar (type: QuintTypeVar): void { ... }
 
  visitTypeConst (type: QuintTypeConst): void { ... }
}

Notice that this implementation has to be stateful since the visit* methods return void.

Implementation plan

Here are the planned steps to get this to main in small chunks of changes:

1. Introduce type aliases for each of the IR components (i.e. { kind: 'name', name: string } & WithId & WithType should become QuintName) to avoid duplication of interface definitions across signatures
2. Introduce the visitor interface and the walk* functions
3. Refactor nameResolver to use a visitor
4. Refactor definitionsCollector to use a visitor
5. Refactor scoping to use a visitor.