Options for Structured Data in Emacs Lisp

So your Emacs package has grown beyond a dozen or so lines of code, and the data it manages is now structured and heterogeneous. Informal plain old lists, the bread and butter of any lisp, are not longer cutting it. You really need to cleanly abstract this structure, both for your own organizational sake any for anyone reading your code.

With informal lists as structures, you might regularly ask questions like, “Was the ‘name’ slot stored in the third list element, or was it the fourth element?” A plist or alist helps with this problem, but those are better suited for informal, externally-supplied data, not for internal structures with fixed slots. Occasionally someone suggests using hash tables as structures, but Emacs Lisp’s hash tables are much too heavy for this. Hash tables are more appropriate when keys themselves are data.

Defining a data structure from scratch

Imagine a refrigerator package that manages a collection of food in a refrigerator. A food item could be structured as a plain old list, with slots at specific positions.

(defun fridge-item-create (name expiry weight)
  (list name expiry weight))

A function that computes the mean weight of a list of food items might look like this:

(defun fridge-mean-weight (items)
  (if (null items)
      0.0
    (let ((sum 0.0)
          (count 0))
      (dolist (item items (/ sum count))
        (setf count (1+ count)
              sum (+ sum (nth 2 item)))))))

Note the use of (nth 2 item) at the end, used to get the item’s weight. That magic number 2 is easy to mess up. Even worse, if lots of code accesses “weight” this way, then future extensions will be inhibited. Defining some accessor functions solves this problem.

(defsubst fridge-item-name (item)
  (nth 0 item))

(defsubst fridge-item-expiry (item)
  (nth 1 item))

(defsubst fridge-item-weight (item)
  (nth 2 item))

The defsubst defines an inline function, so there’s effectively no additional run-time costs for these accessors compared to a bare nth. Since these only cover getting slots, we should also define some setters using the built-in gv (generalized variable) package.

(require 'gv)

(gv-define-setter fridge-item-name (value item)
  `(setf (nth 0 ,item) ,value))

(gv-define-setter fridge-item-expiry (value item)
  `(setf (nth 1 ,item) ,value))

(gv-define-setter fridge-item-weight (value item)
  `(setf (nth 2 ,item) ,value))

This makes each slot setf-able. Generalized variables are great for simplifying APIs, since otherwise there would need to be an equal number of setter functions (fridge-item-set-name, etc.). With generalized variables, both are at the same entrypoint:

(setf (fridge-item-name item) "Eggs")

There are still two more significant improvements.

  1. As far as Emacs Lisp is concerned, this isn’t a real type. The type-ness of it is just a fiction created by the conventions of the package. It would be easy to make the mistake of passing an arbitrary list to these fridge-item functions, and the mistake wouldn’t be caught so long as that list has at least three items. An common solution is to add a type tag: a symbol at the beginning of the structure that identifies it.

  2. It’s still a linked list, and nth has to walk the list (i.e. O(n)) to retrieve items. It would be much more efficient to use a vector, turning this into an efficient O(1) operation.

Addressing both of these at once:

(defun fridge-item-create (name expiry weight)
  (vector 'fridge-item name expiry weight))

(defsubst fridge-item-p (object)
  (and (vectorp object)
       (= (length object) 4)
       (eq 'fridge-item (aref object 0))))

(defsubst fridge-item-name (item)
  (unless (fridge-item-p item)
    (signal 'wrong-type-argument (list 'fridge-item item)))
  (aref item 1))

(defsubst fridge-item-name--set (item value)
  (unless (fridge-item-p item)
    (signal 'wrong-type-argument (list 'fridge-item item)))
  (setf (aref item 1) value))

(gv-define-setter fridge-item-name (value item)
  `(fridge-item-name--set ,item ,value))

;; And so on for expiry and weight...

As long as fridge-mean-weight uses the fridge-item-weight accessor, it continues to work unmodified across all these changes. But, whew, that’s quite a lot of boilerplate to write and maintain for each data structure in our package! Boilerplate code generation is a perfect candidate for a macro definition. Luckily for us, Emacs already defines a macro to generate all this code: cl-defstruct.

(require 'cl-lib)

(cl-defstruct fridge-item
  name expiry weight)

In Emacs 25 and earlier, this innocent looking definition expands into essentially all the above code. The code it generates is expressed in the most optimal form for its version of Emacs, and it exploits many of the available optimizations by using function declarations such as side-effect-free and error-free. It’s configurable, too, allowing for the exclusion of a type tag (:named) — discarding all the type checks — or using a list rather than a vector as the underlying structure (:type). As a crude form of structural inheritance, it even allows for directly embedding other structures (:include).

Two pitfalls

There a couple pitfalls, though. First, for historical reasons, the macro will define two namespace-unfriendly functions: make-NAME and copy-NAME. I always override these, preferring the -create convention for the constructor, and tossing the copier since it’s either useless or, worse, semantically wrong.

(cl-defstruct (fridge-item (:constructor fridge-item-create)
                           (:copier nil))
  name expiry weight)

If the constructor needs to be more sophisticated than just setting slots, it’s common to define a “private” constructor (double dash in the name) and wrap it with a “public” constructor that has some behavior.

(cl-defstruct (fridge-item (:constructor fridge-item--create)
                           (:copier nil))
  name expiry weight entry-time)

(cl-defun fridge-item-create (&rest args)
  (apply #'fridge-item--create :entry-time (float-time) args))

The other pitfall is related to printing. In Emacs 25 and earlier, types defined by cl-defstruct are still only types by convention. They’re really just vectors as far as Emacs Lisp is concerned. One benefit from this is that printing and reading these structures is “free” because vectors are printable. It’s trivial to serialize cl-defstruct structures out to a file. This is exactly how the Elfeed database works.

The pitfall is that once a structure has been serialized, there’s no more changing the cl-defstruct definition. It’s now a file format definition, so the slots are locked in place. Forever.

Emacs 26 throws a wrench in all this, though it’s worth it in the long run. There’s a new primitive type in Emacs 26 with its own reader syntax: records. This is similar to hash tables becoming first class in the reader in Emacs 23.2. In Emacs 26, cl-defstruct uses records instead of vectors.

;; Emacs 25:
(fridge-item-create :name "Eggs" :weight 11.1)
;; => [cl-struct-fridge-item "Eggs" nil 11.1]

;; Emacs 26:
(fridge-item-create :name "Eggs" :weight 11.1)
;; => #s(fridge-item "Eggs" nil 11.1)

So far slots are still accessed using aref, and all the type checking still happens in Emacs Lisp. The only practical change is the record function is used in place of the vector function when allocating a structure. But it does pave the way for more interesting things in the future.

The major short-term downside is that this breaks printed compatibility across the Emacs 25/26 boundary. The cl-old-struct-compat-mode function can be used for some degree of backwards, but not forwards, compatibility. Emacs 26 can read and use some structures printed by Emacs 25 and earlier, but the reverse will never be true. This issue initially tripped up Emacs’ built-in packages, and when Emacs 26 is released we’ll see more of these issues arise in external packages.

Dynamic dispatch

Prior to Emacs 25, the major built-in package for dynamic dispatch — functions that specialize on the run-time type of their arguments — was EIEIO, though it only supported single dispatch (specializing on a single argument). EIEIO brought much of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) to Emacs Lisp, including classes and methods.

Emacs 25 introduced a more sophisticated dynamic dispatch package called cl-generic. It focuses only on dynamic dispatch and supports multiple dispatch, completely replacing the dynamic dispatch portion of EIEIO. Since cl-defstruct does inheritance and cl-generic does dynamic dispatch, there’s not really much left for EIEIO — besides bad ideas like multiple inheritance and method combination.

Without either of these packages, the most direct way to build single dispatch on top of cl-defstruct would be to shove a function in one of the slots. Then the “method” is just a wrapper that call this function.

;; Base "class"

(cl-defstruct greeter
  greeting)

(defun greet (thing)
  (funcall (greeter-greeting thing) thing))

;; Cow "class"

(cl-defstruct (cow (:include greeter)
                   (:constructor cow--create)))

(defun cow-create ()
  (cow--create :greeting (lambda (_) "Moo!")))

;; Bird "class"

(cl-defstruct (bird (:include greeter)
                    (:constructor bird--create)))

(defun bird-create ()
  (bird--create :greeting (lambda (_) "Chirp!")))

;; Usage:

(greet (cow-create))
;; => "Moo!"

(greet (bird-create))
;; => "Chirp!"

Since cl-generic is aware of the types created by cl-defstruct, functions can specialize on them as if they were native types. It’s a lot simpler to let cl-generic do all the hard work. The people reading your code will appreciate it, too:

(require 'cl-generic)

(cl-defgeneric greet (greeter))

(cl-defstruct cow)

(cl-defmethod greet ((_ cow))
  "Moo!")

(cl-defstruct bird)

(cl-defmethod greet ((_ bird))
  "Chirp!")

(greet (make-cow))
;; => "Moo!"

(greet (make-bird))
;; => "Chirp!"

The majority of the time a simple cl-defstruct will fulfill your needs, keeping in mind the gotcha with the constructor and copier names. Its use should feel almost as natural as defining functions.

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Chris Wellons

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