Much, much faster fixes

There are new releases for jfmengels/elm-review (v2.10.0) and the elm-review CLI (v2.8.0) with a lot of new features and improvements. It’s such a big one that I’m going to split it into 2 parts. This first part will mostly deal with the large performance improvements. The second part will deal with a new feature that allows extracting information from a project using elm-review.

If you want to make use of these changes, you should update these dependencies:

npm install elm-review

cd review/
elm-json upgrade

If you’re running into issues where jfmengels/elm-review stays stuck as 2.9.x, then try removing elm-explorations/test first (elm-json uninstall elm-explorations/test). A new major version of that last package came out since our last release. elm-json upgrade --unsafe also seems to work quite well in practice.

Let’s get into the new things!

Simply faster

Before we talk about the new version, I haven’t written about the changes I made around mid-September, where I published new versions of my elm-review Elm packages which (also) focused on performance.

I improved performance by removing a bunch of wasteful (smaller and larger) computations. The performance gains differ from project to project, but according to the reports the tool ran for 75% to even 40% of the time that it did before. So quite a big improvement! I haven’t checked whether the changes made in this specific release increase that even further, but I have a feeling that they do.

I won’t go into the details of these changes, but let me know if you want to know more, and I’ll share some of my learnings in a different blog post. Suffice to say, some rules (especially NoUnused.Exports, NoUnused.CustomTypeConstructors and NoUnused.CustomTypeConstructorArgs) were taking exponentially longer than necessary. On my work project, NoUnused.Exports was running for about 30 seconds, and it’s now down to 1 or 2 seconds.

How do I know that? Well I simply ran it with --benchmark-info. Oh. Yeah. That’s a new thing.

You can now run elm-review --benchmark-info which will tell you how long it took to run specific parts of elm-review’s process, including the time taken for each rule. This was very valuable as it helped me figure out where I should or shouldn’t focus.

Much faster fixes

This is the main change for this release (well, one of the 2, the other one deserves its own announcement). If you’ve ever used elm-review --fix-all on a large project, then chances are that it took long enough for your attention to wander somewhere else.

Just like the Elm compiler for 0.19, I rewrote large parts of the core logic for elm-review to be much faster at fixing issues.

Let’s start with the results. I benchmarked it on 2 projects. The first one is rtfeldman/elm-spa-example, which is an amazing example, but that would use a little tidying 😄. The second one is the Falcon LogScale codebase (where I work) which has around 300k lines of Elm code, on a specifically dirty branch (we fixed all these issues before merging it, obviously).

Before the changes, elm-review fixed 247 issues for elm-spa-example (mostly the unused code removal) in 27-28 seconds (all results are taken on my Dell XPS 15).

Now it does the same work in 8.5 seconds, which means it’s three times as fast!

The results are even more impressive for the Falcon LogScale project, the new version fixed around 260 issues in about 3 minutes. The old version? 40 minutes! This means a 13x speed increase!

Old implementation vs new implementation

I have described how the fix-all implementation worked and how it should work many times on different platforms, because this problem has frustrated me for a long time. So if you’ve heard it before, it should be the last time (but with more details than usual).

Previously, elm-review ran like this:

1. Analyze the whole project with all the rules
2. Go through the list of errors to find a valid fixable error
3. Apply the fix

then go back to step 1 until there are no more fixable errors.

Step 1 would be faster after the initial run because there would be a lot of in-memory caching, but this very simple algorithm was very wasteful as it re-ran rules over and over even when it was obvious it wasn’t necessary to.

The current approach is still quite similar, with a key difference: elm-review will abort early on whenever it finds a valid fixable error. This means that for instance, if you’re running elm-review --fix, it might stop — while running the first rule when it’s halfway through the project — because it found a fixable error, and it will then prompt you to apply or ignore the fix.

In --fix-all mode, it’s slightly different: it will apply the fix on the project in-memory, then resume the analysis from the most optimal file.

For instance, if NoUnused.Variables removed a top-level function because it wasn’t used anywhere — which can only be determined after going through the entire file — it would apply the fix, reparse the file, and then resume the analysis at the start of this file.

For NoUnused.Exports — which reports functions exposed from a module that are never used in other modules — we need to wait until all modules have been reviewed to report errors. At which point we’ll fix the issue, and resume starting from the updated and continue to the other files whose results have potentially been impacted by the fix.

If a rule fixes an issue, it will continue the analysis until it finds no fixable errors for the project. After it’s done, we will re-run all the rules we’ve previously run, followed by the ones we haven’t run yet. If we’re running rules A, B, C, D, E, …, Z (in this order), and rule C finds an issue, then after C is done running, we will run A, B (again) followed by D, E, … Z.

Since rules modify the project, it’s entirely possible that C changed the project in such a way that A or B will now start reporting new errors. In fact, NoUnused.Variables and NoUnused.Exports very commonly remove code that will cause the other one to start reporting new issues.

So that’s the main change: Applying fixes early and reanalyzing only what is necessary, whereas before we simply ran the rules over and over. This is why finding and applying fixes on the Falcon LogScale project took about 40 minutes, because we were basically analyzing the project 260 (+ 1) times, and it is a very large project.

No more progress bars

With this amazing change comes a sacrifice, and that is the progress bar. Previously, elm-review had one that looked like this:

I'm applying fixes! [▇▇▇▇——————] 78/183

Since elm-review analyzed the whole project, it could remember that it had already applied 78 fixes and know that it roughly 105 more to go. That last number would often change as the analysis went on, but it was a useful rough metric to know whether you had a few seconds or a few minutes left to wait.

Since we now stop at the first error, we have no clue how many fixable errors remain, and all that we know is how many we have fixed so far. Therefore, the progress will now be communicated like this:

Fixed 78 issues so far

I’m a bit saddened by this loss, but the performance improvements are definitely worth the trade-off. Hopefully, it will be so fast that you will not even notice the progress messages anymore.

New requirement: differentiate fixable from non-fixable rules

For this new approach to be more efficient, we now run the rules in order: rules that provide fixes first, and rules that don’t provide fixes last. This is so that we don’t have to (re-)run rules that will never find fixable errors anyway until we know we can’t find any more fixes.

Unfortunately, whether a rule can provide fixes was not a piece of information elm-review had so far. This is why there are now ways to tell elm-review whether a rule can provide fixes or not. There is now Rule.providesFixesForModuleRule and Rule.providesFixesForProjectRule, to use if you have a module rule or a project rule respectively.

If you’re running a rule that will provide fixes but does not indicate it, everything should still work as expected but the process will be slower than necessary. This is why I ask every rule author (with custom or published package rules) to please publish a new version of their package if their rules provide fixes 🙏

There is a mechanism in elm-review’s test runner to fail the tests if a rule is found to provide a fix without indicating that it could do so. So if you update the jfmengels/elm-review package in your project, your tests should tell you all that you need to do.

New flag: --fix-limit=N

I started working on this by focusing on making --fix-all faster. At some point, I realized that --fix would use (almost) the same algorithm but with the caveat that it could abort the review process as soon as it found a single fixable error.

In the implementation I used, this was very easily generalizable to stop after N fixes, and so we now have a new flag --fix-limit=N which tells elm-review to abort and prompt after applying N fixes. You can use this along both --fix or --fix-all.

I believe this can be quite useful if you know you’re going to have large amounts of fixes, and want to review them in batches. This can also be useful if the process still takes a long time (which I hope is not the case anymore) and/or you’re pressed for time, in which case you can run elm-review --fix-all --fix-limit=50 for instance and get some changes committed without waiting for all of them to be fixed.

Afterword

This summer I spent a lot of time preparing conference talks about static analysis, and thinking about this craft raised many interesting ideas, yet with little opportunity to put them into practice. I presented my last talk of the year a month ago, and have been focusing on this ever since.

Getting this out feels very good, because I have been wanting this for a very long time. I had actually worked on the same problem maybe 1.5-2 years ago, but the performance came out unchanged. I still have no clue what I did wrong back then.

I have glossed over the work needed to make this change, but I’d say roughly 50% of the core logic has been rewritten over many steps. I tried hard to catch all problems, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some bugs were introduced in this release. If you find any, please open issues in the package or the CLI (pick the one you think is most appropriate) and please provide as much information as you can think can be valuable to fix the issue.

If you feel like you or your company benefit from my efforts, please consider sponsoring me and/or talking to your company about sponsoring me, I would really appreciate it.

I really hope that you will find pleasure in running elm-review at its current fastest (I have more ideas to try out though!), I know I will!

PS: Oh yeah, be on the lookout for the second part of this release.

Written by Jeroen Engels, author of elm-review. If you like what you read or what I made, you can follow me on BlueSky/Mastodon or sponsor me so that I can one day do more of this full-time ❤️.