I've had a lot of fun with tracing decorators in python, but the limitation of data dependent control flow (e.g. an if statement, a for loop) always ends up being more painful that I'd hope. It's a shame since it's such a great pattern otherwise.
Can anyone think of a way to get a nice smooth gradation of tracing based transformations based on effort required or something. I'd love to say, 'okay, in this case i'm willing to put in a bit more effort' and somehow get data dependent if statements working, but not support data dependent loops. All I know of now is either tracing with zero data dependent control flow, or going all the way to writing a python compiler with whatever set of semantics you want to support and full failure on what you don't.
On a different note, some easy decorator DSL based pdb integration would be an incredible enabler for these kinds of things. My coworkers are always trying to write little 'engine' DSLs for one thing or another, and it sucks that whenever you implement your own execution engine, you completely lose all language tooling. As I understand it, in compiler tooling, you always have some burden of shepherding around maps of what part of the source a given thing corresponds to. Ditto for python decorator DSLs, except nobody bothers, meaning you get the equivalent of a 1960's developer experience in that DSL.
CSP (https://github.com/Point72/csp) has a healthy amount of AST parsing for their DSL. Looks like they have debug breakpoints working by augmenting the line numbers in the AST generation
Can anyone think of a way to get a nice smooth gradation of tracing based transformations based on effort required or something. I'd love to say, 'okay, in this case i'm willing to put in a bit more effort' and somehow get data dependent if statements working, but not support data dependent loops. All I know of now is either tracing with zero data dependent control flow, or going all the way to writing a python compiler with whatever set of semantics you want to support and full failure on what you don't.
On a different note, some easy decorator DSL based pdb integration would be an incredible enabler for these kinds of things. My coworkers are always trying to write little 'engine' DSLs for one thing or another, and it sucks that whenever you implement your own execution engine, you completely lose all language tooling. As I understand it, in compiler tooling, you always have some burden of shepherding around maps of what part of the source a given thing corresponds to. Ditto for python decorator DSLs, except nobody bothers, meaning you get the equivalent of a 1960's developer experience in that DSL.