The advantage is a C++ pointer is special, and this approach eliminates the Ptr class type that was causing problems in conversions. Attribute suggestion was courtesy of chandlerc. We're sticking with the Ptr name because it's shorter than Nonnull, and we're likely to keep this in lots of places.
With this, only main.cpp instantiates an arena. Maybe we'll want to split that up more later (e.g., so that the runtime interpreter uses its own arena), but given the intent to have type-checking update the AST, I thought this was a reasonable approach for now in order to avoid ownership complexities.
Fixes#769
Sorry about the big change, this is hard to split. ParenContents is used by both, templated, and expects the same pointer type. While I could duplicate ParenContents with some ExpressionParenContents or PatternParenContents, that seems a little kludgy versus a single large change handling both. The worst of it is that Expression is already pretty sweeping, Pattern is really just incrementally adding.
That said, I believe this includes a couple fixes I found with incorrect use of dyn_cast in typecheck.cpp (checked nullptr at the wrong step in 2 code locations). There's also a missing `*` in member.cpp this caught. I adjust passing of expressions for Return due to nullness (I felt adding another constructor was the best solution).
I add a `.Release()` to BisonWrap due to things like `$3.first` needing some way to work through BIsonWrap. I felt this was better than `operator->`, but feel free to comment if you prefer the other path (`.Release()` conveniently lets me do pair unwrapping, so it felt a better solution).
I do add a TODO to think about better Ptr-to-Ptr cast<> support too, though, as that doesn't work cleanly with LLVM's infra. But so far it seems to only come up in one spot, so I'm not prioritizing it.
`Pattern` is intended to pilot some changes I would like to apply to all our sum types:
- The alternatives are expressed as derived classes rather than members of a `std::variant`.
- The alternatives are classes in the [style guide sense](https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Structs_vs._Classes), meaning they can have invariants, but can't have public data members.
- Creating an object is expressed using a constructor rather than a factory function.
- Accessing an alternative is expressed as a cast (using LLVM's RTTI system) rather than `std::get` or a `Get` method.
Co-authored-by: Jon Meow <46229924+jonmeow@users.noreply.github.com>
Jon Meow
