Two differences compared to the C version:
- You can now select individual paths in the listing, pressing enter
will open the selected path in the browser window.
- Creating this listing is much slower and requires, in the worst case,
a full traversal through the in-memory tree. I've tested this without
the same-dev and shared-parent optimizations (i.e. worst case) on an
import with 30M files and performance was still quite acceptable - the
listing completed in a second - so I didn't bother adding a loading
indicator. On slower systems and even larger trees this may be a
little annoying, though.
(also, calling nonl() apparently breaks detection of the return key,
neither \n nor KEY_ENTER are emitted for some reason)
Under the assumption that there are no external references to files
mentioned in the dump, i.e. a file's nlink count matches the number of
times the file occurs in the dump.
This machinery could also be used for regular scans, when you want to
scan an individual directory without caring about external hard links.
Maybe that should be the default, even? Not sure...
In a similar way to the C version of ncdu: by wrapping malloc(). It's
simpler to handle allocation failures at the source to allow for easy
retries, pushing the retries up the stack will complicate code somewhat
more. Likewise, this is a best-effort approach to handling OOM,
allocation failures in ncurses aren't handled and display glitches may
occur when we get an OOM inside a drawing function.
This is a somewhat un-Zig-like way of handling errors and adds
scary-looking 'catch unreachable's all over the code, but that's okay.
Performance is looking great, but the code is rather ugly and
potentially buggy. Also doesn't handle hard links without an "nlink"
field yet.
Error handling of the import code is different from what I've been doing
until now. That's intentional, I'll change error handling of other
pieces to call ui.die() directly rather than propagating error enums.
The approach is less testable but conceptually simpler, it's perfectly
fine for a tiny application like ncdu.
I plan to add more display options, but ran out of keys to bind.
Probably going for a quick-select menu thingy so that we can keep the
old key bindings for people accustomed to it.
The graph width algorithm is slightly different, but I think this one's
a minor improvement.
I initially wanted to keep a directory's block count and size as a
separate field so that exporting an in-memory tree to a JSON dump would
be easier to do, but that doesn't seem like a common operation to
optimize for. We'll probably need the algorithms to subtract sub-items
from directory counts anyway, so such an export can still be
implemented, albeit slower.
Eaiser to implement now that we're linking against libc.
But exclude pattern matching is extremely slow, so that should really be
rewritten with a custom fnmatch implementation. It's exactly as slow as
in ncdu 1.x as well, I'm surprised nobody's complained about it yet.
And while I'm at it, supporting .gitignore-style patterns would be
pretty neat, too.
The new data model is supposed to solve a few problems with ncdu 1.x's
'struct dir':
- Reduce memory overhead,
- Fix extremely slow counting of hard links in some scenarios
(issue #121)
- Add support for counting 'shared' data with other directories
(issue #36)
Quick memory usage comparison of my root directory with ~3.5 million
files (normal / extended mode):
ncdu 1.15.1: 379M / 451M
new (unaligned): 145M / 178M
new (aligned): 155M / 200M
There's still a /lot/ of to-do's left before this is usable, however,
and there's a bunch of issues I haven't really decided on yet, such as
which TUI library to use.
Backporting this data model to the C version of ncdu is also possible,
but somewhat painful. Let's first see how far I get with Zig.
