The `peepmatic-automata` crate builds and queries finite-state transducer
automata.
A transducer is a type of automata that has not only an input that it
accepts or rejects, but also an output. While regular automata check whether
an input string is in the set that the automata accepts, a transducer maps
the input strings to values. A regular automata is sort of a compressed,
immutable set, and a transducer is sort of a compressed, immutable key-value
dictionary. A [trie] compresses a set of strings or map from a string to a
value by sharing prefixes of the input string. Automata and transducers can
compress even better: they can share both prefixes and suffixes. [*Index
1,600,000,000 Keys with Automata and Rust* by Andrew Gallant (aka
burntsushi)][burntsushi-blog-post] is a top-notch introduction.
If you're looking for a general-purpose transducers crate in Rust you're
probably looking for [the `fst` crate][fst-crate]. While this implementation
is fully generic and has no dependencies, its feature set is specific to
`peepmatic`'s needs:
* We need to associate extra data with each state: the match operation to
evaluate next.
* We can't provide the full input string up front, so this crate must
support incremental lookups. This is because the peephole optimizer is
computing the input string incrementally and dynamically: it looks at the
current state's match operation, evaluates it, and then uses the result as
the next character of the input string.
* We also support incremental insertion and output when building the
transducer. This is necessary because we don't want to emit output values
that bind a match on an optimization's left-hand side's pattern (for
example) until after we've succeeded in matching it, which might not
happen until we've reached the n^th state.
* We need to support generic output values. The `fst` crate only supports
`u64` outputs, while we need to build up an optimization's right-hand side
instructions.
This implementation is based on [*Direct Construction of Minimal Acyclic
Subsequential Transducers* by Mihov and Maurel][paper]. That means that keys
must be inserted in lexicographic order during construction.
[trie]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie
[burntsushi-blog-post]: https://blog.burntsushi.net/transducers/#ordered-maps
[fst-crate]: https://crates.io/crates/fst
[paper]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.24.3698&rep=rep1&type=pdf
