[cfe-dev] Adding indexing support to Clangd

Wed Aug 9 05:54:03 PDT 2017

Awesome, indexing in clangd would be super cool. Do you have a plan on
how to combine this with the "indexing while building" stuff Apple
folks are going to contribute? That will be important when we want to
use clangd with larger projects.

On Tue, Aug 8, 2017 at 7:52 PM, Marc-André Laperle via cfe-dev
<cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
>
> I want to give a little update on the indexing prototype for Clangd I've
> been working on. I wanted to share the actual code on Github before I went
> on vacation but I ran out of time! Sorry about that!
>
>
> Here's a short summary of the several components there now and what's in
> progress:
>
>
> --ClangdIndexStorage--
>
> malloc-like interface that allocates/frees data blocks of variable sizes on
> disk. The blocks can contain ints, shorts, strings, pointers (i.e. file
> offsets), etc. The data is cached in 4K pieces so that local and repeated
> accesses are all done quickly, in memory.
>
> Clangd mallocs and writes its index model objects using this.
>
>
> --BTree--
>
> A pretty classic BTree implementation. Used to speed up lookup (symbol
> names, file names). It allocates its nodes using ClangdIndexStorage
> therefore it is stored on disk. Keys are actually records in
> ClangdIndexStorage so you can really think of the BTree as a collection of
> sorted pointers (sorted according to a provided comparator).
>
>
>
>
> The index model is not very rich yet but the idea is that lower level
> building blocks (ClangdIndexStorage, BTree) will be there so that we can
> start iterating.
>
>
> --ClangdIndexFile--
>
> Path + information about inclusion in order to be able to represent an
> include graph.
>
> The include graph is used to know which files need reindexing for example
> when a header file changes and also which compilation database entry to use
> when opening a header in the editor. The first source file including the
> header file is used to look up the entry in the compilation database. This
> will also be used for the "Include Browser" feature in the future.
>
>
> --ClangdIndexSymbol--
>
> USR + location (pointer to a ClangdIndexFile + start/end offsets)
>
> This only represents definitions in source files for now. This is part of
> the indexing-based feature to "Open Definition".
>
> This is likely to have more changes to represent declaration vs definition,
> references (Find references feature), call graph, etc.
>
>
> --ClangdIndex--
>
> Owns a BTree of ClangdIndexSymbol sorted by USR for fast lookup (used by
> Open Definition for now). getSymbol(USR) returns a ClangdIndexSymbol.
>
> Also owns a BTree of ClangdIndexFile sorted by Path for fast lookup. As
> explained above, used to find proper compilation database entry and to react
> to header changes. getFile(Path) returns a ClangdIndexFile.
>
>
> # Building the index
>
>
> When Clangd gets the initialize request from the client, it is given a
> rootURI. It starts indexing each source files under this root, creating
> ClangdIndexFiles and ClangdIndexSymbols. This is done with the help of
> index::IndexDataConsumer.
>
>
> At the moment, the main covered scenarios are building the index from
> scratch and adding files. Support for modifying files and removing them is
> not fully implemented yet (but this is a must of course!).
>
>
> In case you are wondering, there is no fancy caching of headers or preamble
> used while indexing, so the process is quite slow. I have been focusing on
> the model and persistence of the index versus the input (parsing). This will
> have to be addressed too.
>
>
> # Examples of using the index
>
>
> When the user does the "Open Declaration" command, it retrieves the
> ClangdIndexSymbol from the ClangdIndex using the USR at the requested offset
> (sped up by the BTree). The location of the ClangdIndexSymbol (if found) is
> then returned to the editor.
>
>
> When the user opens a header file, it retrieves the ClangdIndexFile from the
> ClangdIndex using the path of the header (sped up by the BTree). Then it
> recursively finds which file includes it until there is no more, at this
> point chances are that this is a source file. Use this source file path to
> find a potential entry in the compilation database (so that we gets proper
> compiler flags, etc).
>
>
>
>
>
> This is just to give you a taste of what I have in mind and what kind of
> progress is being made. I'd like to have the "lower-level" parts ready for
> review soon after I come back from vacation (Aug 24th). I was thinking that
> ClangdIndexStorage and BTree can go in first as they are quite isolated and
> unit-testable. The rest of the code will also be available on Github to show
> more concrete usage of them if necessary.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Marc-André
>
> ________________________________
> From: cfe-dev <cfe-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org> on behalf of Vladimir
> Voskresensky via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>
> Sent: Thursday, June 1, 2017 3:10:55 PM
> To: cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
>
> Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] Adding indexing support to Clangd
>
>
>
>
> On 06/ 1/17 06:26 PM, Ilya Biryukov via cfe-dev wrote:
>
> Other IDEs do that very similarly to CDT, AFAIK. Compromising correctness,
> but getting better performance.
> Reusing modules would be nice, and I wonder if it could also be made
> transparent to the users of the tool (i.e. we could have an option 'pretend
> these headers are modules every time you encounter them')
> I would expect that to break on most projects, though. Not sure if people
> would be willing to use something that spits tons of errors on them.
> Interesting direction for prototyping...
>
> As Doug mentioned, surprisingly the tricks with headers in the majority of
> projects give pretty good results :-)
>
> In NetBeans we have similar to CDT headers caching approach.
>
> The only difference is that when we hit #include the second time we only
> check if we can skip indexing,
> But we always do "fair lightweight preprocessing" to keep fair context of
> all possible inner #ifdef/#else/#define directives (because they might
> affect the current file).
> For that we use APT (Abstract Preprocessor Tree) per-file which is constant
> for the file and is created once - similar to clang's PTH (Pre-Tokenized
> headers).
>
> Visiting file's APT we can produce different output based on input
> preprocessor state.
> It can be visited in "light" mode or "produce tokens" mode, but it is always
> gives correct result from the strict compiler point of view.
> We also do indexing in parallel and the APT (being immutable) is easily
> shared by index-visitors from all threads.
> Btw stat cache is also reused from all indexing threads with appropriate
> synchronizations.
>
> So in NetBeans we observe that using this tricks (which really looks like
> multi-modules per header file) the majority of projects are in very good
> accuracy + I can also confirm that it gives ~10x speedup.
>
> Hope it helps,
> Vladimir.
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 5:14 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Not sure this has already been discussed, but would it be
>> practical/reasonable to use Clang's modules support for this? Might keep the
>> implementation much simpler - and perhaps provide an extra incentive for
>> users to modularize their build/code which would help their actual build
>> tymes (& heck, parsed modules could even potentially be reused between
>> indexer and final build - making apparent build times /really/ fast)
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 8:12 AM Doug Schaefer via cfe-dev
>> <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> I thought I’d chip in and describe Eclipse CDT’s strategy with header
>>> caching. It’s actually a big cheat but the results have proven to be pretty
>>> good.
>>>
>>> CDT’s hack actually starts in the preprocessor. If we see a header file
>>> has already been indexed, we skip including it. At the back end, we
>>> seamlessly use the index or the current symbol table when doing symbol
>>> lookup. Symbols that get missed because we skipped header files get picked
>>> up out of the index instead. We also do that in the preprocessor to look up
>>> missing macros out of the index when doing macro substitution.
>>>
>>> The performance gains were about an order of magnitude and it magically
>>> works most of the time with the main issue being header files that get
>>> included multiple times affected by different macro values but the effects
>>> of that haven’t been major.
>>>
>>> With clang being a real compiler, I had my doubts that you could even do
>>> something like this without adding hooks in places the front-end gang might
>>> not like. Love to be proven wrong. It really is very hard to keep up with
>>> the evolving C++ standard and we could sure use the help clangd could offer.
>>>
>>> Hope that helps,
>>> Doug.
>>>
>>> From: cfe-dev <cfe-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org> on behalf of Ilya Biryukov
>>> via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>
>>> Reply-To: Ilya Biryukov <ibiryukov at google.com>
>>> Date: Thursday, June 1, 2017 at 10:52 AM
>>> To: Vladimir Voskresensky <vladimir.voskresensky at oracle.com>
>>> Cc: via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>
>>>
>>> Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] Adding indexing support to Clangd
>>>
>>> Thanks for the insights, I think I get the gist of the idea with the
>>> "module" PCH.
>>> One question is: what if the system headers are included after the user
>>> includes? Then we abandon the PCH cache and run the parsing from scratch,
>>> right?
>>>
>>> FileSystemStatCache that is reused between compilation units? Sounds like
>>> a low-hanging fruit for indexing, thanks.
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 11:52 AM, Vladimir Voskresensky
>>> <vladimir.voskresensky at oracle.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi Ilia,
>>>>
>>>> Sorry for the late reply.
>>>> Unfortunately mentioned hacks were done long time ago and I couldn't
>>>> find the changes at the first glance :-(
>>>>
>>>> But you can think about reusable chaned PCHs in the "module" way.
>>>> Each system header is a module.
>>>> There are special index_headers.c and index_headers.cpp files which
>>>> includes all standard headers.
>>>> These files are indexed first and create "module" per #include.
>>>> Module is created once or several times if preprocessor contexts are
>>>> very different like C vs. C++98 vs. C++14.
>>>> Then reused.
>>>> Of course it could compromise the accuracy, but for proof of concept was
>>>> enough to see that expected indexing speed can be achieved theoretically.
>>>>
>>>> Btw, another hint: implementing FileSystemStatCache gave the next
>>>> visible speedup. Of course need to carefully invalidate/update it when file
>>>> was modified in IDE or externally.
>>>> So, finally we got just 2x slowdown, but the accuracy of "real"
>>>> compiler. And then as you know we have started Clank :-)
>>>>
>>>> Hope it helps,
>>>> Vladimir.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 29.05.2017 11:58, Ilya Biryukov wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi Vladimir,
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for sharing your experience.
>>>>
>>>>> We did such measurements when evaluated clang as a technology to be
>>>>> used in NetBeans C/C++, I don't remember the exact absolute numbers now, but
>>>>> the conclusion was:
>>>>>
>>>>> to be on par with the existing NetBeans speed we have to use different
>>>>> caching, otherwise it was like 10 times slower.
>>>>
>>>> It's a good reason to focus on that issue from the very start than.
>>>> Would be nice to have some exact measurements, though. (i.e. on LLVM).
>>>> Just to know how slow exactly was it.
>>>>
>>>>> +1. Btw, may be It is worth to set some expectations what is available
>>>>> during and after initial index phase.
>>>>> I.e. during initial phase you'd probably like to have navigation for
>>>>> file opened in editor and can work in functions bodies.
>>>>
>>>> We definitely want diagnostics/completions for the currently open file
>>>> to be available. Good point, we definitely want to explicitly name the
>>>> available features in the docs/discussions.
>>>>
>>>>> As to initial indexing:
>>>>> Using PTH (not PCH) gave significant speedup.
>>>>>
>>>>> Skipping bodies gave significant speedup, but you miss the references
>>>>> and later have to reindex bodies on demand.
>>>>> Using chainged PCH gave the next visible speedup.
>>>>>
>>>>> Of course we had to made some hacks for PCHs to be more often
>>>>> "reusable" (comparing to strict compiler rule) and keep multiple versions.
>>>>> In average 2: one for C and one for C++ parse context.
>>>>> Also there is a difference between system headers and projects headers,
>>>>> so systems' can be cached more aggressively.
>>>>
>>>> Is this work open-source? The interesting part is how to "reuse" the PCH
>>>> for a header that's included in a different order.
>>>> I.e. is there a way to reuse some cached information(PCH, or anything
>>>> else) for <map> and <vector> when parsing these two files:
>>>> ```
>>>> // foo.cpp
>>>> #include <vector>
>>>> #include <map>
>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>> // bar.cpp
>>>> #include <map>
>>>> #include <vector>
>>>> ....
>>>> ```
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Ilya Biryukov
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Regards,
>>> Ilya Biryukov
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> cfe-dev mailing list
>>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
>>> http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>
>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Ilya Biryukov
>
>
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