fix(tvix/eval/builtins): force acc not list element in foldl' r/5105

When investigating discrepancies between foldl' in tvix and C++ Nix,
I discovered that C++ Nix's foldl' doesn't seem to be strict at all.
Since this seemed wrong, I looked into Haskell's foldl' implementation
which doesn't force the list elements (`val` in our code), but the
accumulation value (`res` in our code). You can look at the code here:
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.17.0.0/docs/src/GHC.List.html#foldl%27

This actually makes a lot of sense: If `res` is not forced after each
application of `op`, we'll end up thunks nested as deeply as the list is
long, potentially taking up a lot of space. This can be limited by
forcing the `res` thunk before applying `op` again (and creating a new
thunk).

I've also PR-ed an equivalent change for C++ Nix at
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/7158. Since this is not merged nor
backported to our Nix 2.3 fork, I've not copied the eval fail test yet,
since it wouldn't when checking our tests against C++ Nix in depot.

Change-Id: I34edf6fc3031fc1485c3e714f2280b4fba8f004b
Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/6947
Autosubmit: sterni <sternenseemann@systemli.org>
Reviewed-by: grfn <grfn@gws.fyi>
Tested-by: BuildkiteCI

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/tvix/eval/src/tests/tvix_tests/eval-okay-foldlStrict-lazy-elements.nix b/tvix/eval/src/tests/tvix_tests/eval-okay-foldlStrict-lazy-elements.nix
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..fc4129a2543a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tvix/eval/src/tests/tvix_tests/eval-okay-foldlStrict-lazy-elements.nix
@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+let
+  lst = builtins.foldl'
+    (acc: x: acc ++ [ x ])
+    [ ]
+    [ 42 (throw "this shouldn't be evaluated") ];
+in
+
+builtins.head lst