Previously, the signature of a `MultiFunction` was always embedded into the function.
There are two issues with that. First, `MFSignature` is relatively large, because it contains
multiple strings and vectors. Secondly, constructing it can add overhead that should not
be necessary, because often the same signature can be reused.
The solution is to only keep a pointer to a signature in `MultiFunction` that is set during
construction. Child classes are responsible for making sure that the signature lives
long enough. In most cases, the signature is either embedded into the child class or
it is allocated statically (and is only created once).
When a function is executed for many elements (e.g. per point) it is often the case
that some parameters are different for every element and other parameters are
the same (there are some more less common cases). To simplify writing such
functions one can use a "virtual array". This is a data structure that has a value
for every index, but might not be stored as an actual array internally. Instead, it
might be just a single value or is computed on the fly. There are various tradeoffs
involved when using this data structure which are mentioned in `BLI_virtual_array.hh`.
It is called "virtual", because it uses inheritance and virtual methods.
Furthermore, there is a new virtual vector array data structure, which is an array
of vectors. Both these types have corresponding generic variants, which can be used
when the data type is not known at compile time. This is typically the case when
building a somewhat generic execution system. The function system used these virtual
data structures before, but now they are more versatile.
I've done this refactor in preparation for the attribute processor and other features of
geometry nodes. I moved the typed virtual arrays to blenlib, so that they can be used
independent of the function system.
One open question for me is whether all the generic data structures (and `CPPType`)
should be moved to blenlib as well. They are well isolated and don't really contain
any business logic. That can be done later if necessary.
Instead of returning a raw pointer, `LinearAllocator.construct(...)` now returns
a `destruct_ptr`, which is similar to `unique_ptr`, but does not deallocate
the memory and only calls the destructor instead.
This addresses warnings from Clang-Tidy's `readability-else-after-return`
rule. This should be the final commit of the series of commits that
addresses this particular rule.
No functional changes.
Object sockets work now, but only the new Object Transforms and the
Particle Mesh Emitter node use it. The emitter does not actually
use the mesh surface yet. Instead, new particles are just emitted around
the origin of the object.
Internally, handles to object data blocks are passed around in the network,
instead of raw object pointers. Using handles has a couple of benefits:
* The caller of the function has control over which handles can be resolved
and therefore limit access to specific data. The set of data blocks that
is accessed by a node tree should be known statically. This is necessary
for a proper integration with the dependency graph.
* When the pointer to an object changes (e.g. after restarting Blender),
all handles are still valid.
* When an object is deleted, the handle is invalidated without causing crashes.
* The handle is just an integer that can be stored per particle and can be cached easily.
The mapping between handles and their corresponding data blocks is
stored in the Simulation data block.
This updates the usage of integer types in code I wrote according to our new style guides.
Major changes:
* Use signed instead of unsigned integers in many places.
* C++ containers in blenlib use `int64_t` for size and indices now (instead of `uint`).
* Hash values for C++ containers are 64 bit wide now (instead of 32 bit).
I do hope that I broke no builds, but it is quite likely that some compiler reports
slightly different errors. Please let me know when there are any errors. If the fix
is small, feel free to commit it yourself.
I compiled successfully on linux with gcc and on windows.
A multi-function network is a graph data structure, where nodes are
multi-functions (or dummies) and links represent data flow.
New multi-functions can be derived from such a network. For that
one just has to specify two sets of sockets in the network that
represent the inputs and outputs of the new function.
It is possible to do optimizations like constant folding on this
data structure, but that is not implemented in this patch yet.
In a next step, user generated node trees are converted into a
MFNetwork, so that they can be evaluated efficiently for many particles.
This patch also includes some tests that cover the majority of the code.
However, this seems to be the kind of code that is best tested by some
.blend files. Building graph structures in code is possible, but is
not easy to understand afterwards.
Reviewers: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8049
