This is an alternative to using `fastUnpack` and `fastPack` to work
on lists of characters.
Using this to refactor the lexer and benchmarking the resulting
compiler on building idris2 shows it's 3 to 5s slower than the
current implementation that goes via `List Char`.
This may be backend-dependent so I still push this to contrib,
with the plan of running further benchmarks in the future.
This also changes the return type of `char` and `string`. They
previously returned `()`, they now return `Char` and `String`
repectively.
Signed-off-by: Alex Humphreys <alex.humphreys@here.com>
Apparently the concrete syntax is controversial ("{apples}"
vs. "$oranges"), so I'm just adding a simple DYI version until we
agree on a concrete syntax
This was taking too long, and adding too many things, because it was
going too deep in the name of having everything accessible at the REPL
and for the compiler. So, it's done a bit differently now, only chasing
everything on a "full" load (i.e., final load at the REPL)
This has some effects:
+ As systems get bigger, load time gets better (on my machine, checking
Idris.Main now takes 52s from scratch, down from 76s)
+ You might find import errors that you didn't previously get, because
things were being imported that shouldn't have been. The new way is
correct!
An unfortunate effect is that sometimes you end up getting "undefined
name" errors even if you didn't explicitly use the name, because
sometimes a module uses a name from another module in a type, which then
gets exported, and eventually needs to be reduced. This mostly happens
because there is a compile time check that should be done which I
haven't implemented yet. That is, public export definitions should only
be allowed to use names that are also public export. I'll get to this
soon.
