Subject: bug#34757: Invalid bytecode from byte compiler

From: Pip Cet <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2019 16:51:13 +0000

On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 8:30 PM Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> > Just to be sure I understand correctly, you would like to remove the
> > decompilation of trivial function calls entirely?
>
> Yes, tho the main motivation was to try and figure out what the
> decompilation is useful for.

Thanks for explaining!

> This only affects "open code" (i.e. not the content of functions, which
> are already never decompiled), so the impact should be minor and it
> removes a rather complicated and brittle chunk of code whose purpose is
> not clear.  It was originally introduced when we didn't have
> byte-compiled function objects, so its main purpose was one of
> performance, to avoid pessimizing the code by replacing trivial function
> calls with more costly (byte-code "...") expressions but nowadays such
> (byte-code "...") expressions only occur basically at the top-level of
> .elc files where such pessimization would be unnoticeable in terms
> of performance.

I agree completely, for what it's worth.

> It does impact the readability of .elc files, OTOH, so I'm not
> completely happy with the result when considering the few cases where
> I was happy to be able to make sense of a .elc file to better understand
> the source of a problem (after all, that's why I wrote the
> elisp-byte-code-mode).

I can speak only for myself, but I think the byte-compiler "magically"
deciding to turn (rare) top-level non-defuns into plain code rather
than byte code is confusing. It's much better with your patches.

> > It seems the special case is necessary to avoid compilation errors,
>
> I haven't found it to be really necessary, no.

Well, you fixed it with the second patch.

> > and that it's used for (byte-compile 3), so I think the comment could
> > be improved a little.
>
> (byte-compile 3) seems to work correctly here even without the
> special case.  It returns (byte-code "\300\207" [3] 1) which is indeed
> a correct expression that evaluates to 3 (just like the argument to
> `byte-compile` was an expression whose evaluation returns 3).

No argument here. The case branch affects what happens when
(byte-compile 3) is called, but isn't necessary for the result to be
correct, and the comment can be misread to imply it's irrelevant in
this case.

> Let's not forget that what `byte-compile` tries to do is to preserve the
> invariant that
>
>     (eval EXP) ≃ (eval (byte-compile EXP))

I think byte-compile does different things for different arguments:
the behavior for symbols and other expressions is simply different.

> This said, if you remove the special case, you will bump into
> a corner-case bug in `byte-compile` which happens because that function
> incorrectly considers that `byte-compile-top-level` returns a value
> whereas in reality it returns an expression (just like `byte-compile`):
> the decompilation happens to turn expressions that return constant
> values (like byte-compiled functions) into their value (as an
> optimization which relies on the fact that those objects are
> self-evaluating), so if you remove it, you then bump into this bug of
> byte-compile.  The patch below would fix this bug.

I don't think that was a bug, but it was an unfortunate wrinkle in the
(undocumented) API of byte-compile-top-level.

> But indeed the decompilation of constants is handy since that's what
> people expect from `byte-compile`.  When I (byte-compile '(lambda (x)
> (foo))) I expect to receive a byte-compiled function, and not
> a byte-code expression which when evaluated will return that
> byte-compiled function.

I think it's more than handy: it's how I'd read the current
documentation, and how I'd expect a function called byte-compile to
behave.

> > I'm not sure this case can actually happen without doing something
> > silly, but (byte-compile '(internal-get-closed-var 0)) throws an error
> > with Stefan's patch, because the byte code is (byte-constant . 0)
> > (byte-return).
>
> This source code is arguably invalid, so it's not a real problem, but

The source code is invalid, but the LAP code is valid-looking, and I
can't conclude it cannot be generated by valid source code being
passed to `byte-compile' somehow.

> diff --git a/lisp/emacs-lisp/bytecomp.el b/lisp/emacs-lisp/bytecomp.el
> index f46cab2c17..ae17553d0c 100644
> --- a/lisp/emacs-lisp/bytecomp.el
> +++ b/lisp/emacs-lisp/bytecomp.el
> @@ -2674,7 +2674,11 @@ byte-compile
>           (setq fun (byte-compile-top-level fun nil 'eval)))
>          (if macro (push 'macro fun))
>          (if (symbolp form)
> -            (fset form fun)
> +            ;; byte-compile returns an *expression* equivalent to the

I think this would be clearer if it read "byte-compile-top-level
returns an *expression*..."