i'm at a loss of words after reading a paper about reformatting code using an ML model that has a measured statistical quantity A_c which says how often the reformatted code behaves the same as the original
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@whitequark But... why? Why not just use a linter?
@DaKangaroo see edit
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i'm at a loss of words after reading a paper about reformatting code using an ML model that has a measured statistical quantity A_c which says how often the reformatted code behaves the same as the original
the "ideal" (their choice of words) case is 64.2%
@whitequark I cannot even
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@porglezomp you'll love Fig. 6
@whitequark @porglezomp long live the new flesh
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@ireneista @whitequark Now, show me the numbers on the effort to make a rule-based style file compared to this. Because I'm sure that A_c is 100.0 in that case.
@GeoffWozniak @ireneista so the problem i'm solving is that while for C++, you have tools like clang-format which are nice and flexible, for Rust you have rustfmt which is rigid and makes your code look like ass. I do not like my code looking like ass but I am also receptive to the idea that introducing as many knobs as clang-format has into rustfmt would make it unmaintainable
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i'm at a loss of words after reading a paper about reformatting code using an ML model that has a measured statistical quantity A_c which says how often the reformatted code behaves the same as the original
the "ideal" (their choice of words) case is 64.2%
@whitequark this technology is going to be amazing for the competitive advantage of the few software firms that refuse to use it
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i'm at a loss of words after reading a paper about reformatting code using an ML model that has a measured statistical quantity A_c which says how often the reformatted code behaves the same as the original
the "ideal" (their choice of words) case is 64.2%
@whitequark Saw your edit with the motivation for reading research. I doubt there's anything out there doing this well, but I think the smart approach to doing it well would be to evaluate and score a bunch of candidate standard-class rules across the codebase, solve for a set that maximally approximates what's already there, then apply some sort of pattern learning for the remaining instances that "break the rules", hopefully identifying correlations between them.
Basically, going as far as you can with simple comprehensible deterministic rules before you start throwing magical statistics at it.
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@GeoffWozniak @ireneista so the problem i'm solving is that while for C++, you have tools like clang-format which are nice and flexible, for Rust you have rustfmt which is rigid and makes your code look like ass. I do not like my code looking like ass but I am also receptive to the idea that introducing as many knobs as clang-format has into rustfmt would make it unmaintainable
@whitequark @ireneista I have not had to deal with rustfmt yet. For clang-format, I work in existing projects and use (very) mildly tweaked variants of the base style for the project.
At the risk of instigating the canonical bikeshed discussion, I am a conformist formatter and have not concerned myself with modifying style all that much. But I agree that clang-format has some bizarre knobs to tweak.
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@whitequark Saw your edit with the motivation for reading research. I doubt there's anything out there doing this well, but I think the smart approach to doing it well would be to evaluate and score a bunch of candidate standard-class rules across the codebase, solve for a set that maximally approximates what's already there, then apply some sort of pattern learning for the remaining instances that "break the rules", hopefully identifying correlations between them.
Basically, going as far as you can with simple comprehensible deterministic rules before you start throwing magical statistics at it.
@dalias i specifically do not want this because of two reasons:
- it requires software that doesn't exist (e.g. there are no Rust formatters that expose enough deterministic knobs for me)
- it doesn't resolve the rigidity of the underlying formatter
there is existing research doing the thing you're talking about here, which you could probably use as-is to achieve what you want (it even has an explainer tool for the rules it generates—note I haven't tried it, just read the abstract); I want the formatter to be somewhat liberal about the code it accepts. whether I think the code should be formatted a certain way (as a maintainer) is non-deterministic, so I see no real issue with the statistical model having chaotic-but-deterministic behavior in some cases as long as overall the behavior is reasonable
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@whitequark @ireneista I have not had to deal with rustfmt yet. For clang-format, I work in existing projects and use (very) mildly tweaked variants of the base style for the project.
At the risk of instigating the canonical bikeshed discussion, I am a conformist formatter and have not concerned myself with modifying style all that much. But I agree that clang-format has some bizarre knobs to tweak.
@GeoffWozniak @ireneista I view code as art so I find strongly canonicalizing formatters like
blackto be actively destructive. right now I use Ruff with a 300-line configuration for some of the Python code and I think there's gotta be a better way to approach this that isn't destructive -
@dalias i specifically do not want this because of two reasons:
- it requires software that doesn't exist (e.g. there are no Rust formatters that expose enough deterministic knobs for me)
- it doesn't resolve the rigidity of the underlying formatter
there is existing research doing the thing you're talking about here, which you could probably use as-is to achieve what you want (it even has an explainer tool for the rules it generates—note I haven't tried it, just read the abstract); I want the formatter to be somewhat liberal about the code it accepts. whether I think the code should be formatted a certain way (as a maintainer) is non-deterministic, so I see no real issue with the statistical model having chaotic-but-deterministic behavior in some cases as long as overall the behavior is reasonable
@dalias the problem this is solving is that some contributors have an allergic reaction to getting "please format this in <X way>" review comments, so having a tool that gets a patch 95% to the way it 'ought' to be should lower friction in much the same way that adopting a strongly canonicalizing formatter like
blackwould, without downsides of the latter -
@dalias i specifically do not want this because of two reasons:
- it requires software that doesn't exist (e.g. there are no Rust formatters that expose enough deterministic knobs for me)
- it doesn't resolve the rigidity of the underlying formatter
there is existing research doing the thing you're talking about here, which you could probably use as-is to achieve what you want (it even has an explainer tool for the rules it generates—note I haven't tried it, just read the abstract); I want the formatter to be somewhat liberal about the code it accepts. whether I think the code should be formatted a certain way (as a maintainer) is non-deterministic, so I see no real issue with the statistical model having chaotic-but-deterministic behavior in some cases as long as overall the behavior is reasonable
@whitequark I didn't mean rejecting code that's not formatted "right" according to a deterministing formatter. I meant evaluaring how closely each of a set of candidate deterministic rules is followed by the code whose style you want to mimic, in order to determine a set of deterministic rules that get you close, then build a model for the exceptions to those rules.
It's not just that I think this would have the biggest chance of success, but also that it mimics the thought process I'd go through for formatting code by hand where there are general principles I have in mind but I'm happy to break the rules whenever doing something different would make it more readable, easier to work with, or whatever.
Indeed however I doubt there is research on this or sufficient prerequisite tooling to make it easy.
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@GeoffWozniak @ireneista I view code as art so I find strongly canonicalizing formatters like
blackto be actively destructive. right now I use Ruff with a 300-line configuration for some of the Python code and I think there's gotta be a better way to approach this that isn't destructive@whitequark @GeoffWozniak that's our view as well
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@whitequark I didn't mean rejecting code that's not formatted "right" according to a deterministing formatter. I meant evaluaring how closely each of a set of candidate deterministic rules is followed by the code whose style you want to mimic, in order to determine a set of deterministic rules that get you close, then build a model for the exceptions to those rules.
It's not just that I think this would have the biggest chance of success, but also that it mimics the thought process I'd go through for formatting code by hand where there are general principles I have in mind but I'm happy to break the rules whenever doing something different would make it more readable, easier to work with, or whatever.
Indeed however I doubt there is research on this or sufficient prerequisite tooling to make it easy.
@dalias I feel like building a difference model is a much more difficult approach to pursue while still exhibiting the undesirable chaotic behavior in some edge cases. anyway, time will tell if this works the way we want to build it or not
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@whitequark @GeoffWozniak that's our view as well
@ireneista @GeoffWozniak based on a discussion with someone who has worked on this problem before we want to try building a diffusion model that captures the whitespace between code tokens and is then able to inject it into a given parsetree, which appears to be a fairly efficient and unproblematic way to do this
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@ireneista @GeoffWozniak based on a discussion with someone who has worked on this problem before we want to try building a diffusion model that captures the whitespace between code tokens and is then able to inject it into a given parsetree, which appears to be a fairly efficient and unproblematic way to do this
@ireneista @GeoffWozniak and everything that is best done on a parsetree (import ordering for example) will be done in the parsetree because it ain't broken
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@ireneista @GeoffWozniak and everything that is best done on a parsetree (import ordering for example) will be done in the parsetree because it ain't broken
@whitequark @GeoffWozniak yeah this is a recurring research topic for us, we've talked with several of our friends about it over the years. just making a parser/generator that properly round-trip whitespace and comments is already a ton of work, alas...
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@ireneista @GeoffWozniak and everything that is best done on a parsetree (import ordering for example) will be done in the parsetree because it ain't broken
@whitequark @ireneista This sounds a lot like XSLT (or XSLT-adjacent).
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@whitequark @GeoffWozniak yeah this is a recurring research topic for us, we've talked with several of our friends about it over the years. just making a parser/generator that properly round-trip whitespace and comments is already a ton of work, alas...
@ireneista @GeoffWozniak there's tree-sitter nowadays which I believe should do that (and I think it should be failure-tolerant considering its fairly wide use in editors: nvim, zed, etc)
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@ireneista @GeoffWozniak there's tree-sitter nowadays which I believe should do that (and I think it should be failure-tolerant considering its fairly wide use in editors: nvim, zed, etc)
@ireneista @GeoffWozniak my literal first Python project was making a Python parser that fully captures source spans (which wasn't upstream at the time--in 2014 or so), so i'm quite familiar with the topic by now
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@GeoffWozniak @ireneista I view code as art so I find strongly canonicalizing formatters like
blackto be actively destructive. right now I use Ruff with a 300-line configuration for some of the Python code and I think there's gotta be a better way to approach this that isn't destructive@whitequark @ireneista I very much respect that.
I view code like writing and I will tweak structure and form for far too long sometimes. Layout ends up getting less of my attention.
