The purpose of the translation item collector is to find all monomorphic instances of functions, methods and statics that need to be translated into LLVM IR in order to compile the current crate.
So far these instances have been discovered lazily during the trans path. For incremental compilation we want to know the set of these instances in advance, and that is what the trans::collect module provides.
In the future, incremental and regular translation will be driven by the collector implemented here.
With this commit, metadata encoding and decoding can make use of thread-local encoding and decoding contexts. These allow implementers of `serialize::Encodable` and `Decodable` to access information and
datastructures that would otherwise not be available to them. For example, we can automatically translate def-id and span information during decoding because the decoding context knows which crate the data is decoded from. Or it allows to make `ty::Ty` decodable because the context has access to the `ty::ctxt` that is needed for creating `ty::Ty` instances.
Some notes:
- `tls::with_encoding_context()` and `tls::with_decoding_context()` (as opposed to their unsafe versions) try to prevent the TLS data getting out-of-sync by making sure that the encoder/decoder passed in is actually the same as the one stored in the context. This should prevent accidentally reading from the wrong decoder.
- There are no real tests in this PR. I had a unit tests for some of the core aspects of the TLS implementation but it was kind of brittle, a lot of code for mocking `ty::ctxt`, `crate_metadata`, etc and did actually test not so much. The code will soon be tested by the first incremental compilation auto-tests that rely on MIR being properly serialized. However, if people think that some tests should be added before this can land, I'll try to provide some that make sense.
r? @nikomatsakis
With this commit, metadata encoding and decoding can make use of
thread-local encoding and decoding contexts. These allow implementers
of serialize::Encodable and Decodable to access information and
datastructures that would otherwise not be available to them. For
example, we can automatically translate def-id and span information
during decoding because the decoding context knows which crate the
data is decoded from. Or it allows to make ty::Ty decodable because
the context has access to the ty::ctxt that is needed for creating
ty::Ty instances.
