Investigating compressing fallback spans into fewer bytes

[dtolnay]

The compiler's proc_macro::Span uses an efficient encoding in 4 bytes. Currently our span when procmacro2_semver_exempt is enabled is a whopping 12 bytes because it essentially looks like:

enum Span { // tag + padding = 4 bytes
    Compiler(proc_macro::Span), // 4 bytes
    Fallback(struct Span { // 8 bytes
        lo: u32,
        hi: u32,
    }),
}

And it goes up to 16 bytes when embedded next to 8-byte pointers due to additional padding.

This has a performance impact because syntax trees contain lots of spans.

We need to investigate interning the spans or some other trick to cut the size.

[mystor]

Interestingly the Span type within rustc is actually 8 bytes long in its "compressed" form! https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/85a360e0ea2f1629b8851e7c9b2903bbdbab42bf/src/libsyntax_pos/span_encoding.rs#L13-L65

That being said, the spans which we get within proc-macro are, in fact, smaller than that. Thanks to the bridge, they are passed around as a NonZeroU32 handle type, which is stored in a handle table. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/85a360e0ea2f1629b8851e7c9b2903bbdbab42bf/src/libproc_macro/bridge/handle.rs#L9

The table is effectively a 2-way mapping from handle to value, and from value to handle. Something vaguely like the following:

struct SpanInterning {
  data: BTreeMap<Span, SpanInfo>,
  interner: HashMap<SpanInfo, Span>,
}

Interestingly, as Span is Copy, it could also be possible for us to store it within an untagged union and select which version to use based on the return value of nightly_works(), which combined with these changes could lead to 4-byte proc_macro2::Span values, although that may not be sound.

[dtolnay]

That seems promising. It would be good to benchmark the 4 byte approach using an intern table and nightly_works against an 8 byte approach laid out as:

• First 4 bytes: union { proc_macro::Span, hi }
• Second 4 bytes: lo, where u32::MAX means that we're a compiler span

because our lexer always produces lo and hi separated by the width of the token, so lo can't be u32::MAX.

[mystor]

That seems promising. It would be good to benchmark the 4 byte approach using an intern table and nightly_works against an 8 byte approach laid out as:

* First 4 bytes: union { proc_macro::Span, hi }

* Second 4 bytes: lo, where u32::MAX means that we're a compiler span

because our lexer always produces lo and hi separated by the width of the token, so lo can't be u32::MAX.

Hmm, yeah that could work. We'd likely also want to have some sort of dynamic test failure in case rustc ever decides to change size_of::<Span>(). I wonder if it's worthwhile to make lo and/or hi be NonZeroU32 like proc_macro::Span is. IIRC we don't have Option<Span> often, so might not be meaningful savings.

I'm also pretty sure that, even if lo could be u32::max_value(), it wouldn't be an issue to lower the ceiling by one.

[dtolnay]

Syn has quite a few places that are Option<Token![ ]> where the token type only holds the token's span, so it would be good to use NonZeroU32 where possible.