string expressions by and large do not need the benefits a Symbol gives us,
instead they pollute the symbol table and cause unnecessary overhead for almost
all strings. the one place we can think of that benefits from them (attrpaths
with expressions) extracts the benefit in the parser, which we'll have to touch
anyway when changing ExprString to hold strings.
this gives a sizeable improvement on of 3-5% on all benchmarks we've run.
before
nix search --no-eval-cache --offline ../nixpkgs hello
Time (mean ± σ): 8.844 s ± 0.045 s [User: 6.750 s, System: 1.663 s]
Range (min … max): 8.758 s … 8.922 s 20 runs
nix eval -f ../nixpkgs/pkgs/development/haskell-modules/hackage-packages.nix
Time (mean ± σ): 367.4 ms ± 3.3 ms [User: 332.3 ms, System: 35.2 ms]
Range (min … max): 364.0 ms … 375.2 ms 20 runs
nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
Time (mean ± σ): 2.810 s ± 0.030 s [User: 2.517 s, System: 0.225 s]
Range (min … max): 2.742 s … 2.854 s 20 runs
after
nix search --no-eval-cache --offline ../nixpkgs hello
Time (mean ± σ): 8.533 s ± 0.068 s [User: 6.485 s, System: 1.642 s]
Range (min … max): 8.404 s … 8.657 s 20 runs
nix eval -f ../nixpkgs/pkgs/development/haskell-modules/hackage-packages.nix
Time (mean ± σ): 347.6 ms ± 3.1 ms [User: 313.1 ms, System: 34.5 ms]
Range (min … max): 343.3 ms … 354.6 ms 20 runs
nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
Time (mean ± σ): 2.709 s ± 0.032 s [User: 2.414 s, System: 0.232 s]
Range (min … max): 2.655 s … 2.788 s 20 runs
pennae
9ac836d1d6