docs(tvix/eval): add design documentation for attrset opcodes r/4428

Change-Id: I303b57e035543f4597c6247983d1d533e4014638
Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/6092
Tested-by: BuildkiteCI
Reviewed-by: grfn <grfn@gws.fyi>

1 files changed, 122 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/tvix/eval/docs/opcodes-attrsets.md b/tvix/eval/docs/opcodes-attrsets.md
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..7026f3319dda
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tvix/eval/docs/opcodes-attrsets.md
@@ -0,0 +1,122 @@
+# attrset-opcodes
+
+The problem with attrset literals is twofold:
+
+1. The keys of attribute sets may be dynamically evaluated.
+
+   Access:
+
+   ```nix
+   let
+     k = "foo";
+     attrs = { /* etc. */ };
+   in attrs."${k}"
+   ```
+
+   Literal:
+   ```nix
+   let
+     k = "foo";
+   in {
+     "${k}" = 42;
+   }
+   ```
+
+   The problem with this is that the attribute set key is not known at
+   compile time, and needs to be dynamically evaluated by the VM as an
+   expression.
+
+   For the most part this should be pretty simple, assuming a
+   theoretical instruction set:
+
+   ```
+   0000  OP_CONSTANT(0) # key "foo"
+   0001  OP_CONSTANT(1) # value 42
+   0002  OP_ATTR_SET(1) # construct attrset from 2 stack values
+   ```
+
+   The operation pushing the key needs to be replaced with one that
+   leaves a single value (the key) on the stack, i.e. the code for the
+   expression, e.g.:
+
+   ```
+   0000..000n <operations leaving a string value on the stack>
+   000n+1     OP_CONSTANT(1) # value 42
+   000n+2     OP_ATTR_SET(1) # construct attrset from 2 stack values
+   ```
+
+   This is fairly easy to do by simply recursing in the compiler when
+   the key expression is encountered.
+
+2. The keys of attribute sets may be nested.
+
+   This is the non-trivial part of dealing with attribute set
+   literals. Specifically, the nesting can be arbitrarily deep and the
+   AST does not guarantee that related set keys are located
+   adjacently.
+
+   Furthermore, this frequently occurs in practice in Nix. We need a
+   bytecode representation that makes it possible to construct nested
+   attribute sets at runtime.
+
+   Proposal: AttrPath values
+
+   If we can leave a value representing an attribute path on the
+   stack, we can offload the construction of nested attribute sets to
+   the `OpAttrSet` operation.
+
+   Under the hood, OpAttrSet in practice constructs a `Map<NixString,
+   Value>` attribute set in most cases. This means it expects to pop
+   the value of the key of the stack, but is otherwise free to do
+   whatever it wants with the underlying map.
+
+   In a simple example, we could have code like this:
+
+   ```nix
+   {
+     a.b = 15;
+   }
+   ```
+
+   This would be compiled to a new `OpAttrPath` instruction that
+   constructs and pushes an attribute path from a given number of
+   fragments (which are popped off the stack).
+
+   For example,
+
+   ```
+   0000 OP_CONSTANT(0)  # key "a"
+   0001 OP_CONSTANT(1)  # key "b"
+   0002 OP_ATTR_PATH(2) # construct attrpath from 2 fragments
+   0003 OP_CONSTANT(2)  # value 42
+   0004 OP_ATTRS(1)     # construct attrset from one pair
+   ```
+
+   Right before `0004` the stack would be left like this:
+
+   [ AttrPath[a,b], 42 ]
+
+   Inside of the `OP_ATTRS` instruction we could then begin
+   construction of the map and insert the nested attribute sets as
+   required, as well as validate that there are no duplicate keys.
+
+3. Both of these cases can occur simultaneously, but this is not a
+   problem as the opcodes combine perfectly fine, e.g.:
+
+   ```nix
+   let
+     k = "a";
+   in {
+     "${k}".b = 42;
+   }
+   ```
+
+   results in
+
+   ```
+   0000..000n <operations leaving a string value on the stack>
+   000n+1     OP_CONSTANT(1)  # key "b"
+   000n+2     OP_ATTR_PATH(2) # construct attrpath from 2 fragments
+   000n+3     OP_CONSTANT(2)  # value 42
+   000n+4     OP_ATTR_SET(1)  # construct attrset from 2 stack values
+   ```