mirror of
https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu.git
synced 2026-01-13 01:08:41 -09:00
c077c5bed5
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.
83 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
83 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
# ncdu-zig
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## Description
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Ncdu is a disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface. It is designed to find
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space hogs on a remote server where you don't have an entire graphical setup
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available, but it is a useful tool even on regular desktop systems. Ncdu aims
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to be fast, simple and easy to use, and should be able to run in any minimal
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POSIX-like environment with ncurses installed.
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## This Zig implementation
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This branch represents an experimental rewrite of ncdu using the [Zig
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programming language](https://ziglang.org/). It is supposed to be fully
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compatible (in terms of behavior, UI and CLI flags) with the C version, so it
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can eventually be used as a drop-in replacement.
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Since Zig itself is still very much unstable and things tend to break with each
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release, I can't in good conscience publish this rewrite as a proper release of
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ncdu (...yet). I intent to maintain the C version as long as necessary while
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Zig matures and gets more widely supported among Linux/BSD systems.
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This rewrite is a test-bed for various improvements to the design of ncdu that
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would impact large parts of its codebase. The improvements may also be
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backported to the C version, depending on how viable a proper Zig release is.
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### Implementation status
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Missing features:
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- Lots of informational UI windows
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- Directory refresh
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- File deletion
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- Opening a shell
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- OOM handling
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### Improvements compared to the C version
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Already implemented:
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- Significantly reduced memory usage, achieved by:
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- Removing pointers between nodes that are not strictly necessary for basic
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tree traversal (this impacts *all* code in the C version of ncdu).
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- Using separate structs for directory, file and hard link nodes, each storing
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only the information necessary for that particular type of node.
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- Using an arena allocator and getting rid of data alignment.
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- Improved performance of hard link counting (fixing
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[#121](https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu/issues/121)).
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- Add support for separate counting hard links that are shared with other
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directories or unique within the directory (issue
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[#36](https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu/issues/36)).
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(Implemented in the data model, but not displayed in the UI yet)
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- Faster --exclude-kernfs thanks to `statfs()` caching.
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- Improved handling of Unicode and special characters.
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- Remembers item position when switching directories.
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Potentially to be implemented:
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- Faster --exclude-pattern matching
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- Multithreaded scanning
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- Exporting a JSON dump after scanning into RAM
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- Transparent dump (de)compression by piping through gzip/bzip2/etc
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### Regressions compared to the C version
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Aside from this implementation being unfinished:
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- Assumes a UTF-8 locale and terminal.
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- No doubt somewhat less portable.
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- Listing all paths for a particular hard link requires a full search through
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the in-memory directory tree.
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- Not nearly as well tested.
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- Directories that could not be opened are displayed as files.
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## Requirements
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- Latest Zig compiler
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- Some sort of POSIX-like OS
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- ncurses libraries and header files
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## Install
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**todo**
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