Ideas to make the compiler output more useful

[alaviss]

This discussion is a collection of ideas on how to deal with the failings of the compiler output where most of us just reach for --hints:off to stop the compiler from distracting us.

[alaviss]

To start, we should disable these useless hints by default:

• CC: It really doesn't matter to the user that the compiler is executing the C compiler...
• Conf: Users might want to know if their configurations are used... but they only need to know that once.
• Processing: Probably the most useless hint, it doesn't provide anything of substance and even now it is replaced with dots. The next step is to get rid of it from the default set.

[saem]

I think context matters, dev, nightlies, vs anything tagged.

[alaviss]

Potentially useful hints to enable by default:

• Source: displays the error line with annotations on where:

test.nim(1, 6) Error: undeclared identifier: 'xd'
candidates (edit distance, scope distance); see '--spellSuggest': 
 (2, 3): '!=' [template declared in /usr/lib/nim/lib/system/comparisons.nim(128, 10)]
 (2, 3): '$' [func declared in /usr/lib/nim/lib/system/dollars.nim(25, 8)]
 (2, 3): '$' [func declared in /usr/lib/nim/lib/system/dollars.nim(25, 8)]
 (2, 3): '$' [func declared in /usr/lib/nim/lib/system/dollars.nim(25, 8)]
  echo xd
       ^

[disruptek]

The problem is, if you remove Processing and CC then there's really no indication of what's to blame for slow re/compilation.

[alaviss]

People who are interested in those information can just toggle the switches on again (or even better, we add timing information for compiler devs).

[saem]

Yes, but most of the folks using nimskull are interested. I think there is a maturity/indirection point where we should flip this switch, I just don't believe that's today.

I suppose what we could do is in the tagged releases change the config included to suppress this crap. But in nightlies and dev it's on by default, as in the config is as is.

[disruptek]

I suppose what we could do is in the tagged releases change the config included to suppress this crap. But in nightlies and dev it's on by default, as in the config is as is.

This sounds like a bad idea to me; more confusing than simply letting it spam us. After all, I'd rather take one for the team here than have disparate configurations between nightlies and tagged releases.

[juancarlospaco]

Structured logging as optional, TSV or JSON lines (new line delimited JSON),
that way custom logging post-processing scripts and filters can be created easily by users, you can pipe logs to other tools, feed logs to log analisys API, etc.

[haxscramper]

• @juancarlospaco Structured report logging via TSV is trivial, can be easily implemented using custom writer
• Processing, especially the .-style one, is pretty useless. In addition to that, . require weird hacks with printing - the only report that cannot be printed via newline
• @alaviss Source should not be a hint in the first place, it is a global configuration value that for some reason was included in the hints category. Otherwise, I do think it must be enabled by default