In this update, we continue to improve the overall stability of the new
type solver. We're also shipping some early bits of two new features,
one of the language and one of the analysis API: user-defined type
functions and an incremental typechecking API.
If you use the new solver and want to use all new fixes included in this
release, you have to reference an additional Luau flag:
```c++
LUAU_DYNAMIC_FASTINT(LuauTypeSolverRelease)
```
And set its value to `645`:
```c++
DFInt::LuauTypeSolverRelease.value = 645; // Or a higher value for future updates
```
## New Solver
* Fix a crash where scopes are incorrectly accessed cross-module after
they've been deallocated by appropriately zeroing out associated scope
pointers for free types, generic types, table types, etc.
* Fix a crash where we were incorrectly caching results for bound types
in generalization.
* Eliminated some unnecessary intermediate allocations in the constraint
solver and type function infrastructure.
* Built some initial groundwork for an incremental typecheck API for use
by language servers.
* Built an initial technical preview for [user-defined type
functions](https://rfcs.luau-lang.org/user-defined-type-functions.html),
more work still to come (including calling type functions from other
type functions), but adventurous folks wanting to experiment with it can
try it out by enabling `FFlag::LuauUserDefinedTypeFunctionsSyntax` and
`FFlag::LuauUserDefinedTypeFunction` in their local environment. Special
thanks to @joonyoo181 who built up all the initial infrastructure for
this during his internship!
## Miscellaneous changes
* Fix a compilation error on Ubuntu (fixes#1437)
---
Internal Contributors:
Co-authored-by: Aaron Weiss <aaronweiss@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Hunter Goldstein <hgoldstein@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Jeremy Yoo <jyoo@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vighnesh Vijay <vvijay@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
---------
Co-authored-by: Alexander McCord <amccord@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vighnesh <vvijay@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Aviral Goel <agoel@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: David Cope <dcope@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Lily Brown <lbrown@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Junseo Yoo <jyoo@roblox.com>
Working towards a full e-graph implementation as described by the [egg
paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.03082).
The type system has a couple of places where e-graphs would've been
useful and solved some classes of problems trivially. For example:
1. Normalization and simplification cannot handle cyclic types due to
the nature of their implementation.
2. Normalization can't tell when two tables or functions are equivalent,
but simplification theoretically can albeit not implemented.
3. Normalization requires deep normalization for inhabitance check,
whereas simplification would've returned the `never` type itself
indicating uninhabited.
4. Simplification requires constraint ordering to have perfect timing to
simplify.
5. Adding a rewrite rule requires implementing it twice, once in
simplification and once again in normalization with completely different
code design making it hard to verify that their behavior is materially
equivalent.
6. In cases where we must cache for performance, two different types
that are isomorphic have different cache entries resulting in cache
misses.
7. Type family reduction can handle cyclic type families, but only if
the cycle is not obscured by a different type family instance. (`t1
where t1 = union<number, add<t1, number>>` is irreducible)
I think we're getting the point!
---
Currently the implementation is missing a few features that makes
e-graphs actually useful. Those will be coming in a future PR.
1. Pattern matching,
6. Applying rewrites,
7. Rewrite until saturation, and
8. Extracting the best e-node according to some cost function.
# What's changed?
* Optimize table.maxn. This function is now 5-14x faster
* Reserve Luau stack space for error message.
## New Solver
* Globals can be type-stated, but only if they are already in scope
* Fix a stack overflow that could occur when normalizing certain kinds
of recursive unions of intersections (of unions of intersections...)
* Fix an assertion failure that would trigger when the __iter metamethod
has a bad signature
## Native Codegen
* Type propagation and temporary register type hints
* Direct vector property access should only happen for names of right
length
* BytecodeAnalysis will only predict that some of the vector value
fields are numbers
---
## Internal Contributors
Co-authored-by: Alexander McCord <amccord@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Aviral Goel <agoel@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
# What's Changed
## New Type Solver
- Many more fixes to crashes, assertions, and hangs
- Annotated locals now countermand the inferred types of locals, meaning
that for a type `type MyType = number | string`, `local foo : MyType =
5` behaves the same as `local foo = 5 :: MyType`, where before, foo
would be assigned the type of the value on the rhs.
- Type Normalization now respects resource limits.
- Subtyping between classes and cyclic tables now supported
## Native Code Generation
- Work on the Native Code Generation(NCG) allocator continues
---
# Internal Contributors
Co-authored-by: Aaron Weiss <aaronweiss@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Alexander McCord <amccord@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: James McNellis <jmcnellis@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vighnesh Vijay <vvijay@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
---------
Co-authored-by: Aaron Weiss <aaronweiss@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Alexander McCord <amccord@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Aviral Goel <agoel@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: David Cope <dcope@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Lily Brown <lbrown@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
# What's changed
### Debugger
* Values after a 'continue' statement should not be accessible by
debugger in the 'until' condition
### New Type Solver
* Many fixes to crashes and hangs
* Better bidirectional inference of table literal expressions
### Native Code Generation
* Initial steps toward a shared code allocator
---
### Internal Contributors
Co-authored-by: Aaron Weiss <aaronweiss@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Lily Brown <lbrown@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
- Implemented [Require by String with Relative
Paths](https://github.com/luau-lang/rfcs/blob/master/docs/new-require-by-string-semantics.md)
RFC
- Implemented [Require by String with
Aliases](https://github.com/luau-lang/rfcs/blob/master/docs/require-by-string-aliases.md)
RFC with support for `paths` and `alias` arrays in .luarc
- Added SUBRK and DIVRK bytecode instructions to speed up
constant-number and constant/number operations
- Added `--vector-lib`, `--vector-ctor` and `--vector-type` options to
luau-compile to support code with vectors
New Solver
- Correctness fixes to subtyping
- Improvements to dataflow analysis
Native Code Generation
- Added bytecode analysis pass to predict type tags used in operations
- Fixed rare cases of numerical loops being generated without an
interrupt instruction
- Restored optimization data propagation into the linear block
- Duplicate buffer length checks are optimized away
Miscellaneous
- Small performance improvements to new non-strict mode
- Introduced more scripts for fuzzing Luau and processing the results,
including fuzzer build support for CMake
Co-authored-by: Alexander McCord <amccord@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Aviral Goel <agoel@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: David Cope <dcope@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Lily Brown <lbrown@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vighnesh Vijay <vvijay@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
---------
Co-authored-by: Aaron Weiss <aaronweiss@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Alexander McCord <amccord@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Aviral Goel <agoel@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: David Cope <dcope@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Lily Brown <lbrown@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
New Solver
* New algorithm for inferring the types of locals that have no
annotations. This
algorithm is very conservative by default, but is augmented with some
control
flow awareness to handle most common scenarios.
* Fix bugs in type inference of tables
* Improve performance of by switching out standard C++ containers for
`DenseHashMap`
* Infrastructure to support clearer error messages in strict mode
Native Code Generation
* Fix a lowering issue with buffer.writeu8 and 0x80-0xff values: A
constant
argument wasn't truncated to the target type range and that causes an
assertion failure in `build.mov`.
* Store full lightuserdata value in loop iteration protocol lowering
* Add analysis to compute function bytecode distribution
* This includes a class to analyze the bytecode operator distribution
per
function and a CLI tool that produces a JSON report. See the new cmake
target `Luau.Bytecode.CLI`
---------
Co-authored-by: Aaron Weiss <aaronweiss@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Alexander McCord <amccord@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Aviral Goel <agoel@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Lily Brown <lbrown@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
## What's changed
- `bit32.byteswap` added
([RFC](4f543ec23b/docs/function-bit32-byteswap.md))
- Buffer library implementation
([RFC](4f543ec23b/docs/type-byte-buffer.md))
- Fixed a missing `stdint.h` include
- Fixed parser limiter for recursive type annotations being kind of
weird (fixes#645)
### Native Codegen
- Fixed a pair of issues when lowering `bit32.extract`
- Fixed a narrow edge case that could result in an infinite loop without
an interruption
- Fixed a negative array out-of-bounds access issue
- Temporarily reverted linear block predecessor value propagation
### New type solver
- We now type check assignments to annotated variables
- Fixed some test cases under local type inference
- Moved `isPending` checks for type families to improve performance
- Optimized our process for testing if a free type is sufficiently
solved
- Removed "none ptr" from lea instruction disassembly logging
### Build system & tooling
- CMake configuration now validates dependencies to maintain separation
between components
- Improvements to the fuzzer coverage
- Deduplicator for fuzzed callstacks
---------
Co-authored-by: Arseny Kapoulkine <arseny.kapoulkine@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Aaron Weiss <aaronweiss@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Vighnesh Vijay <vvijay@roblox.com>
- Cleaned up `FFlag::FixFindBindingAtFunctionName`,
`FFlag::LuauNormalizeBlockedTypes`, `FFlag::LuauPCallDebuggerFix`
- Added support for break and continue into control flow analysis
- The old type unification engine will now report a more fine-grained
error at times, indicating that type normalization in particular failed
# New Type Solver
- Refactor of Unifier2, the new unification implementation for Luau
- Completed MVP of new unification implementation
- Dramatically simplified overload selection logic
- Type family reduction can now apply sooner to free types that have
been solved
- Subtyping now supports table indexers
- Generalization now replaces bad generics with unknown
# Native Code Generation
- Reduce stack spills caused by FINDUPVAL and STORE_TAG
- Improve Generate SHL/SHR/SAR/rotates with immediate operands in X64
- Removed redundant case re-check in table lookup fallback
---------
Co-authored-by: Arseny Kapoulkine <arseny.kapoulkine@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
Co-authored-by: Lily Brown <lbrown@roblox.com>
* AST queries at position where function name is will now return
AstExprLocal
* Lexer performance has been slightly improved
* Fixed incorrect string singleton autocomplete suggestions (fixes#858)
* Improved parsing error messages
* Fixed crash on null pointer access in unification (fixes#1017)
* Native code support is enabled by default and `native=1`
(make)/`LUAU_NATIVE` (CMake)/`-DLUA_CUSTOM_EXECUTION` configuration is
no longer required
New typechecker:
* New subtyping check can now handle generic functions and tables
(including those that contain cycles)
Native code generation:
* Loops with non-numeric parameters are now handled by VM to streamline
native code
* Array size check can be optimized away in SETLIST
* On failure, CodeGen::compile returns a reason
* Fixed clobbering of non-volatile xmm registers on Windows
* Fix a use-after-free bug in the new type cloning algorithm
* Tighten up the type of `coroutine.wrap`. It is now `<A..., R...>(f:
(A...) -> R...) -> ((A...) -> R...)`
* Break `.luaurc` out into a separate library target `Luau.Config`. This
makes it easier for applications to reason about config files without
also depending on the type inference engine.
* Move typechecking limits into `FrontendOptions`. This allows embedders
more finely-grained control over autocomplete's internal time limits.
* Fix stability issue with debugger onprotectederror callback allowing
break in non-yieldable contexts
New solver:
* Initial work toward [Local Type
Inference](0e1082108f/rfcs/local-type-inference.md)
* Introduce a new subtyping test. This will be much nicer than the old
test because it is completely separate both from actual type inference
and from error reporting.
Native code generation:
* Added function to compute iterated dominance frontier
* Optimize barriers in SET_UPVALUE when tag is known
* Cache lua_State::global in a register on A64
* Optimize constant stores in A64 lowering
* Track table array size state to optimize array size checks
* Add split tag/value store into a VM register
* Check that spills can outlive the block only in specific conditions
---------
Co-authored-by: Arseny Kapoulkine <arseny.kapoulkine@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
* Added luau-compile executable target to build/test compilation without
having full REPL included.
In our new typechecker:
* Fixed the order in which constraints are checked to get more
deterministic errors in different environments
* Fixed `isNumber`/`isString` checks to fix false positive errors in
binary comparisons
* CannotCallNonFunction error is reported when calling an intersection
type of non-functions
In our native code generation (jit):
* Outlined X64 return instruction code to improve code size
* Improved performance of return instruction on A64
* Added construction of a dominator tree for future optimizations
* Fixed incorrect lexeme generated for string parts in the middle of an
interpolated string (Fixes https://github.com/Roblox/luau/issues/744)
* DeprecatedApi lint can report some issues without type inference
information
* Fixed performance of autocomplete requests when suggestions have large
intersection types (Solves
https://github.com/Roblox/luau/discussions/847)
* Marked `table.getn`/`foreach`/`foreachi` as deprecated ([RFC:
Deprecate
table.getn/foreach/foreachi](https://github.com/Roblox/luau/blob/master/rfcs/deprecate-table-getn-foreach.md))
* With -O2 optimization level, we now optimize builtin calls based on
known argument/return count.
Note that this change can be observable if `getfenv/setfenv` is used to
substitute a builtin, especially if arity is different.
Fastcall heavy tests show a 1-2% improvement.
* Luau can now be built with clang-cl (Fixes
https://github.com/Roblox/luau/issues/736)
We also made many improvements to our experimental components.
For our new type solver:
* Overhauled data flow analysis system, fixed issues with 'repeat'
loops, global variables and type annotations
* Type refinements now work on generic table indexing with a string
literal
* Type refinements will properly track potentially 'nil' values (like
t[x] for a missing key) and their further refinements
* Internal top table type is now isomorphic to `{}` which fixes issues
when `typeof(v) == 'table'` type refinement is handled
* References to non-existent types in type annotations no longer resolve
to 'error' type like in old solver
* Improved handling of class unions in property access expressions
* Fixed default type packs
* Unsealed tables can now have metatables
* Restored expected types for function arguments
And for native code generation:
* Added min and max IR instructions mapping to vminsd/vmaxsd on x64
* We now speculatively extract direct execution fast-paths based on
expected types of expressions which provides better optimization
opportunities inside a single basic block
* Translated existing math fastcalls to IR form to improve tag guard
removal and constant propagation
* Fix a bug where reading a property from an unsealed table caused
inference to improperly infer the existence of that property.
* Fix#827
We have also made a lot of progress on the new solver and the JIT. Both
projects are still in the process of being built out. Neither are ready
for general use yet.
We are mostly working to tighten up how the new solver handles
refinements and updates to unsealed tables to bring it up to the same
level as the old solver.
---------
Co-authored-by: Arseny Kapoulkine <arseny.kapoulkine@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Vyacheslav Egorov <vegorov@roblox.com>
* https://github.com/Roblox/luau/pull/719
* Improved `Failed to unify type packs` error message to be reported as
`Type pack 'X' could not be converted into 'Y'`
* https://github.com/Roblox/luau/pull/722
* 1% reduction in executed instruction count by removing a check in fast
call dispatch
* Additional fixes to reported error location of OOM errors in VM
* Improve `math.sqrt`, `math.floor` and `math.ceil` performance on
additional compilers and platforms (1-2% geomean improvement including
8-9% on math-cordic)
* All thrown exceptions by Luau analysis are derived from
`Luau::InternalCompilerError`
* When a call site has fewer arguments than required, error now reports
the location of the function name instead of the argument to the
function
* https://github.com/Roblox/luau/pull/724
* Fixed https://github.com/Roblox/luau/issues/725
Co-authored-by: Arseny Kapoulkine <arseny.kapoulkine@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Andy Friesen <afriesen@roblox.com>
* Reoptimized math.min/max/bit32 builtins assuming at least 2 arguments are used (1-2% lift on some benchmarks)
* Type errors that mention function types no longer have redundant parenthesis around return type
* Luau REPL now supports --compile=remarks which displays the source code with optimization remarks embedded as comments
* Builtin calls are slightly faster when called with 1-2 arguments (~1% improvement in some benchmarks)
* Adds a currently unused x86-64 assembler as a prerequisite for possible future JIT compilation
* Fix a bug in table iteration (closes Possible table iteration bug #504)
* Improved warning method when function is used as a type
* Fix a bug with unsandboxed iteration with pairs()
* Type of coroutine.status() is now a union of value types
* Bytecode output for tests/debugging now has labels
* Improvements to loop unrolling cost estimation
* Report errors when the key obviously doesn't exist in the table
Adds a `luau-ast` CLI that dumps Luau source to JSON. @asajeffrey and I are planning to use this functionality to construct an Agda model of the Luau type system/operational semantics, to allow formally proving properties of Luau's type systems.
- Improve refinement support for unions, in particular it's now possible to implement tagged unions as a union of tables where individual branches use a string literal type for one of the fields.
- Fix `string.split` type information
- Optimize `select(_, ...)` to run in constant time (~2.7x faster on VariadicSelect benchmark)
- Improve debug line information for multi-line assignments
- Improve compilation of table literals when table keys are constant expressions/variables
- Use forward GC barrier for `setmetatable` which slightly accelerates GC progress
- TableOperations lint now includes a warning for table.create(N, {}) (which is likely a mistake since the table is shared by all entries)
- Type checker now type checks #v when v is a union
- Parser now rejects sources that consists of a single unfinished long comment
- Work around significant MSVC 2022 performance regression, bringing it more or less in line with MSVC 2019
- Compiler now predicts array size for newly allocated tables when the table is filled in a short loop
- Small improvements in compilation throughput (~2% faster)
- Implement paged sweeper for GC which improves sweep throughput 2-3x and reduces memory consumption by 8 bytes per object (once it is stabilized we will see additional 8 bytes per object of savings)
- Improve Repl Tab completion
- Repl now supports -i (interactive mode to run code in context of a script's environment) and -On (to control optimization flags)
We keep getting compat reports for warnings in various compiler
versions. While we can keep merging PRs to resolve these warnings, it
would be nice if the users of other compilers or compiler versions weren't
blocked on us fixing this.
As such, this change disables Werror by default and only enables it when
requested, which happens in CI in test builds.
