Add a primop ‘concatLists’

This can serve as a generic efficient list builder.  For instance, the
function ‘catAttrs’ in Nixpkgs can be rewritten from

  attr: l: fold (s: l: if hasAttr attr s then [(getAttr attr s)] ++ l else l) [] l

to

  attr: l: builtins.concatLists (map (s: if hasAttr attr s then [(getAttr attr s)] else []) l)

Statistics before:

  time elapsed: 1.08683
  size of a value: 24
  environments allocated: 1384376 (35809568 bytes)
  list elements: 6946783 (55574264 bytes)
  list concatenations: 37434
  values allocated: 1760440 (42250560 bytes)
  attribute sets allocated: 392040
  right-biased unions: 186334
  values copied in right-biased unions: 591137
  symbols in symbol table: 18273
  number of thunks: 1297673
  number of thunks avoided: 1380759
  number of attr lookups: 430802
  number of primop calls: 628912
  number of function calls: 1333544

Statistics after (including new catAttrs):

  time elapsed: 0.959854
  size of a value: 24
  environments allocated: 1010198 (26829296 bytes)
  list elements: 1984878 (15879024 bytes)
  list concatenations: 30488
  values allocated: 1589760 (38154240 bytes)
  attribute sets allocated: 392040
  right-biased unions: 186334
  values copied in right-biased unions: 591137
  symbols in symbol table: 18274
  number of thunks: 1040925
  number of thunks avoided: 1038428
  number of attr lookups: 438419
  number of primop calls: 474844
  number of function calls: 959366

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/libexpr/eval.hh b/src/libexpr/eval.hh
index 4e66c4dfcc91..a1f26a0566d1 100644
--- a/src/libexpr/eval.hh
+++ b/src/libexpr/eval.hh
@@ -232,6 +232,8 @@ public:
     void mkAttrs(Value & v, unsigned int expected);
     void mkThunk_(Value & v, Expr * expr);
 
+    void concatLists(Value & v, unsigned int nrLists, Value * * lists);
+
     /* Print statistics. */
     void printStats();