This commit is a refactoring and modernization of wiggle's
`BorrowChecker` implementation. This type is quite old and predates
everything related to the component model for example. This type
additionally predates the implementation of WASI threads for Wasmtime as
well. In general, this type is old and has not been updated in a long
time.
Originally a `BorrowChecker` was intended to be a somewhat cheap method
of enabling the host to have active safe shared and mutable borrows to
guest memory. Over time though this hasn't really panned out. The WASI
threads proposal, for example, doesn't allow safe shared or mutable
borrows at all. Instead everything must be modeled as a copy in or copy
out of data. This means that all of `wasmtime-wasi` and `wasi-common`
have largely already been rewritten in such a way to minimize borrows
into linear memory.
Nowadays the only types that represent safe borrows are the `GuestSlice`
type and its equivalents (e.g. `GuestSliceMut`, `GuestStr`, etc). These
are minimally used throughout `wasi-common` and `wasmtime-wasi` and when
they are used they're typically isolated to a small region of memory.
This is all coupled with the facst that `BorrowChecker` never ended up
being optimized. It's a `Mutex<HashMap<..>>` effectively and a pretty
expensive one at that. The `Mutex` is required because `&BorrowChecker`
must both allow mutations and be `Sync`. The `HashMap` is used to
implement precise byte-level region checking to fulfill the original
design requirements of what `wiggle` was envisioned to be.
Given all that, this commit guts `BorrowChecker`'s implementation and
functionality. The type is now effectively a glorified `RefCell` for the
entire span of linear memory. Regions are no longer considered when
borrows are made and instead a shared borrow is considered as borrowing
the entirety of shared memory. This means that it's not possible to
simultaneously have a safe shared and mutable borrow, even if they're
disjoint, at the same time.
The goal of this commit is to address performance issues seen in #7973
which I've seen locally as well. The heavyweight implementation of
`BorrowChecker` isn't really buying us much nowadays, especially with
much development having since moved on to the component model. The hope
is that this much coarser way of implementing borrow checking, which
should be much more easily optimizable, is sufficient for the needs of
WASI and not a whole lot else.
Alex Crichton
bc4d4cb143