Notes on tax issues on selling digital goods internationally

Note: This blog post should not be considered tax, legal or any other sort of advice. There are no guarantees of any kind, even that any of the information below is correct. Consult a qualified professional before embarking on any international business ventures.

Some tax requirements for selling pretty much anything internationally (that I found out by googling and looking up random government web sites)

Nowadays it is easy to start a web store and sell products such as digital downloads to any country in the world. You might think that simply paying appropriate taxes in your own country would be enough. It's not. There are cases where you need to pay taxes or fees to other countries as well, specifically the ones you sell your products to. Surprisingly this can be the case even for very small amounts of money.

There seem to be three main cases: USA, the EU and individual countries. Let's go through them in increasing order of difficulty.

Individual countries

Most countries have a requirement that if you sell digital goods to them you need to register in said country, collect the appropriate amount of tax on your sales and then report and pay it. Most countries have a lower limit under which you don't need to do anything. This is usually on the order of 10 000 to 100 000 euros per year, which small scale operations won't ever reach. Unfortunately in some countries this limit is zero. That is, if your sales are even one euro, you need to register and do the full bureaucratic dance. These countries include Albania, Russia, South Korea and India among others. Lists of limits per country can be found online. Be careful when reading them, though, as web pages can get out of date quickly.

For small businesses the only realistic choice is to geoblock countries where the tax limit is zero. Dealing with the hassles is just not worth it. This is fairly easy, as most payment providers have good geoblocking tools.

VAT in the European Union

In the EU you can do the same registration to each country as for individual countries discussed above. However there is also a new, simplified system for digital services called VAT MOSS. The idea there is that you don't need to register to each country, instead you can report VAT purchases to your own tax authorities and they take care of the rest. This is highly convenient, because you can then sell to every EU member state but only have to deal with the bureaucracy of one of them.

There is a similar thing for non-EU companies, but I have not looked at how it works in detail for obvious reasons. Just note that the registration limit for EU is also zero, meaning if you must register if you sell anything at all to the EU. Sadly this means that for some people geoblocking all of EU is an entire reasonable thing to do.

Sales tax in the USA

The good news is that the USA does not have a federal sales tax. The bad news is that each state has its own laws on sales taxes. Whether or not you need to pay sales taxes on a given state depends on whether you have a "nexus" in the state. This used to mean something like an office. However then buying stuff over the Internet happened and now having a nexus simply means selling more than a given threshold's worth of goods or services to people in the state. Lists of these limits per state can be found online as well.

This is where things get unpleasant for small players. The limit for Kansas is zero, meaning any sales to Kansas means you have to register, gather sales tax and pay it to the state authorities. Other states have reasonable limits such as 100 000 dollars, but the obligation is also triggered if you have more than 200 sales events in total regardless of their value. This is a lot easier to trigger by accident.

Unfortunately payment processors don't seem to provide state-based geoblocking. Thus if you enable sales to the USA and that leads to even one sale in Kansas, you just got hit by a bunch of legal requirements. Dealing with all of these is not really feasible for small operations. On the other hand blocking all of USA means losing a fairly large chunk of your revenue.

To keep things from being too simple, there are web pages that claim that having an "economic nexus" is actually different for digital products. Based on that page Kansas does not have a sales tax at all for purely digital products, so you could sell arbitrary amount of products there without needing to pay any sales tax. Which one of these is correct? I don't actually know. I have spent the entire day reading up on international tax laws and now my head hurts and I just want to close the computer and have a drink.

What does this mean for tipping services like Patreon, crowdfunding et al?

Again: I don't really know. However a case can reasonably be made (at least by a tax collector that wants to get your money) that paying through one of those platforms constitutes a "sale of services" or something similar and thus subject to a sales tax. For example Patreon's documentation page states that they take care of paying VAT for EU customers but that customers in the USA need to take care of their tax responsibilities themselves. Presumably this also applies to all other countries.

Thus it may be the case that everyone who is running a tipping service and has taken any money from countries or states with a zero limit on sales taxes have unexpectedly been burdened with legal responsibilities to tens of different tax offices around the world.

In any case all of this means that things like gathering funds for open source development is a lot more complicated than appears at first glance.

There are (at least) three distinct dependency types

Using dependencies is one of the main problems in software development today. It has become even more complicated with the recent emergence of new programming languages and the need to combine them with existing programs. Most discussion about it has been informal and high level, so let's see if we can make it more disciplined and how different dependency approaches work.

What do we mean when we say "work"?

In this post we are going to use the word "work" in a very specific way. A dependency application is said to work if and only if we can take two separate code projects where one uses the other and use them together without needing to write special case code. That is, we should be able to snap the two projects together like Lego. If this can be done to arbitrary projects with a success rate of more than 95%, then the approach can be said to work.

It should be especially noted that "I tried this with two trivial helloworld projects and it worked for me" does not fulfill the requirements of working. Sadly this line of reasoning is used all too often in online dependency discussions, but it is not a response that holds any weight. Any approach that has not been tested with at least tens (preferably hundreds) of packages does not have enough real world usage experience to be taken seriously.

The phases of a project

Every project has three distinctive phases on its way from source code to a final executable.

1. Original source in the source directory
2. Compiled build artifacts in the build directory
3. Installed build artifacts on the system

In the typical build workflow step 1 happens after you have done a Git checkout or equivalent. Step 2 happens after you have successfully built the code with ninja all. Step 3 happens after a ninja install.

The dependency classes

Each of these phases has a corresponding way to use dependencies. The first and last ones are simple so let's examine those first.

The first one is the simplest. In a source-only world you just copy the dependency's source inside your own project, rewrite the build definition files and use it as if it was an integral part of your own code base. The monorepos used by Google, Facebook et al are done in this fashion. The main downsides are that importing and updating dependencies is a lot of work.

The third approach is the traditional Linux distro approach. Each project is built in isolation and installed either on the system or in a custom prefix. The dependencies provide a pkg-config file explaining which defines both the dependency and how it should be used. This approach is easy to use and scales really well, the main downside being that you usually end up with multiple versions of some dependency libraries on the same file system, which means that they will eventually get mixed up and crash in spectacular but confusing ways.

The second approach

A common thing people want to do is to mix two different languages and build systems in the same build directory. That is, to build multiple different programming languages with their own build systems intermixed so that one uses the built artifacts of the other directly from the build dir.

This turns out to be much, much, much more difficult than the other two. But why is that?

Approach #3 works because each project is clearly separated and the installed formats are simple, unambiguous and well established. This is not the case for build directories. Most people don't know this, but binaries in build directories are not the same as the installed ones Every build system conjures its own special magic and does things slightly differently. The unwritten contract has been that the build directory is each build system's internal implementation detail. They can do with it whatever they want, just as long as after install they provide the output in the standard form.

Mixing the contents of two build systems' build directories is not something that "just happens". Making one "just call" the other does not work simply because of the N^2 problem. For example, currently you'd probably want to support C and C++ with Autotools, CMake and Meson, D with Dub, Rust with Cargo, Swift with SwiftPM, Java with Maven (?) and C# with MSBuild. That is already up to 8*7 = 56 integrations to write and maintain.

The traditional way out is to define a data interchange protocol to declare build-dir dependencies. This has to be at least as rich in semantics as pkg-config, because that is what it is: a pkg-config for build dirs. In addition to that you need to formalise all the other things about setup and layout that pkg-config gets for free by convention and in addition you need to make every build system adhere to that. This seems like a tall order and no-one's really working on it as far as I know.

What can we do?

If build directories can't be mixed and system installation does not work due to the potential of library mixups, is there anything that we can do? It turns out not only that we can, but that there is already a potential solution (or least an approach for one): Flatpak.

The basic idea behind Flatpak is that it defines a standalone file system for each application that looks like a traditional Linux system's root file system. Dependencies are built and installed there as if one was installing them to the system prefix. What makes this special is that the filesystem separation is enforced by the kernel. Within each application's file system only one version of any library is visible. It is impossible to accidentally use the wrong version. This is what traditional techniques such as rpath and LD_LIBRARY_PATH have always tried to achieve, but have never been able to do reliably. With kernel functionality this becomes possible, even easy.

What sets Flatpak apart from existing app container technologies such as iOS and Android apps, UWP and so on is its practicality. Other techs are all about defining new, incompatible worlds that are extremely limited and invasive (for example spawning new processes is often prohibited). Flatpak is not. It is about making the app environment look as much as possible like the enclosing system. In fact it goes to great lengths to make this work transparently and it succeeds admirably. There is not a single developer on earth who would tolerate doing their own development inside a, say, iOS app. It is just too limited. By contrast developing inside Flatpak is not only possible and convenient, but something people already do today.

The possible solution, then, is to shift the dependency consumption from option 2 to option 3 as much as possible. It has only one real new requirement: each programming language must have a build system agnostic way of providing prebuilt libraries. Preferably this should be pkg-config but any similar neutral format will do. (For those exclaiming "we can't do that, we don't have a stable ABI", do not worry. Within the Flatpak world there is only one toolchain, system changes cause a full rebuild.)

With this the problem is now solved. All one needs to do is to write a Flatpak builder manifest that builds and installs the dependencies in the correct order. In this way we can mix and match languages and build systems in arbitrary combinations and things will just work. We know it will, because the basic approach is basically how Debian, Fedora and all other distros are already put together.

Process invocation will forever be broken

Invoking new processes is, at its core, a straightforward operation. Pretty much everything you need to know to understand it can be seen in the main declaration of the helloworld program:

#include<stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    printf("Hello, world.\n");
    return 0;
}

The only (direct) information passed to the program is an array of strings containing its (command line) arguments. Thus it seems like an obvious conclusion that there is a corresponding function that takes an executable to run and an array of strings with the arguments. This turns out to be the case, and it is what the exec family of functions do. An example would be execve.

This function only exists on posixy operating systems, it is not available on Windows. The native way to start processes on Windows is the CreateProcess function. It does not take an array of strings, instead it takes a string:

BOOL CreateProcessA(
  LPCSTR lpApplicationName,
  LPSTR  lpCommandLine,
  ...

The operating system then internally splits the string into individual components using an algorithm that is not at all simple or understandable and whose details most people don't even know.

Side note: why does Windows behave this way?

I don't know for sure. But we can formulate a reasonable theory by looking in the past. Before Windows existed there was DOS, and it also had a way of invoking processes. This was done by using interrupts, in this case function 4bh in interrupt 21h. Browsing through online documentation we can find a relevant snippet:

Action: Loads a program for execution under the control of an existing program. By means of altering the INT 22h to 24h vectors, the calling prograrn [sic] can ensure that, on termination of the called program, control returns to itself.

On entry: AH = 4Bh

AL = 0: Load and execute a program

AL = 3: Load an overlay

DS.DX = segment:offset of the ASCIIZ pathname

ES:BX = Segment:offset of the parameter block

Parameter block bytes:

0-1: Segment pointer to envimmnemnt [sic] block

2-3: Offset of command tail

4-5: Segment of command tail

Here we see that the command is split in the same way as in the corresponding Win32 API call, into ta command to execute and a single string that contains the arguments (the command tail, though some sources say that this should be the full command line). This interrupt handler could take an array of strings instead, but does not. Most likely this is because it was the easiest thing to implement in real mode x86 assembly.

When Windows 1.0 appeared, its coders probably either used the DOS calls directly or copied the same code inside Windows' code base for simplicity and backwards compatibility. When the Win32 API was created they probably did the exact same thing. After all, you need the single string version for backwards compatibility anyway, so just copying the old behaviour is the fast and simple thing to do.

Why is this behaviour bad?

There are two main use cases for invoking processes: human invocations and programmatic invocations. The former happens when human beings type shell commands and pipelines interactively. The latter happens when programs invoke other programs. For the former case a string is the natural representation for the command, but this is not the case for the latter. The native representation there is an array of strings, especially for cross platform code because string splitting rules are different on different platforms. Implementing shell-based process invocation on top of an interface that takes an array of strings is straightforward, but the opposite is not.

Often command lines are not invoked directly but are instead passed from one program to another, stored to files, passed over networks and so on. It is not uncommon to pass a full command line as a command line argument to a different "wrapper" command and so on. An array of string is trivial to pass through arbitrarily deep and nested scenarios without data loss. Plain strings not so much. Many, many, many programs do command string splitting completely wrong. They might split it on spaces because it worksforme on this machine and implementing a full string splitter is a lot of work (thousands of lines of very tricky C at the very least). Some programs don't quote their outputs properly. Some don't unquote their inputs properly. Some do quoting unreliably. Sometimes you need to know in advance how many layers of unquoting your string will go through in advance so you can prequote it sufficiently beforehand (because you can't fix any of the intermediate blobs). Basically every time you pass commands as strings between systems, you get a parsing/quoting problem and a possibility for shell code injection. At the very least the string should carry with it information on whether it is a unix shell command line or a cmd.exe command line. But it doesn't, and can't.

Because of this almost all applications that deal with command invocation kick the can down the road and use strings rather than arrays, even though the latter is the "correct" solution. For example this is what the Ninja build system does. If you go through the rationale for this it is actually understandable and makes sense. The sad downside is that everyone using Ninja (or any such tool) has to do command quoting and parsing manually and then ninja-quote their quoted command lines.

This is the crux of the problem. Because process invocation is broken on Windows, every single program that deals with cross platform command invocation has to deal with commands as strings rather than an array of strings. This leads to every program using commands as strings, because that is the easy and compatible thing to do (not to mention it gives you the opportunity to close bugs with "your quoting is wrong, wontfix"). This leads to a weird kind of quantum entanglement where having things broken on one platform breaks things on a completely unrelated platform.

Can this be fixed?

Conceptually the fix is simple: add a new function, say, CreateProcessCmdArray to Win32 API. It is identical to plain CreateProcess except that it takes an array of strings rather than a shell command string. The latter can be implemented by running Windows' internal string splitter algorithm and calling the former. Seems doable, and with perfect backwards compatibility even? Sadly, there is a hitch.

It has been brought to my attention via unofficial channels [1] that this will never happen. The people at Microsoft who manage the Win32 API have decreed this part of the API frozen. No new functionality will ever be added to it. The future of Windows is WinRT or UWP or whatever it is called this week.

UWP is conceptually similar to Apple's iOS application bundles. There is only one process which is fully isolated from the rest of the system. Any functionality that need process isolation (and not just threads) must be put in its own "service" that the app can then communicate with using RPC. This turned out to be a stupid limitation for a desktop OS with hundreds of thousands of preexisting apps, because it would require every Win32 app using multiple processes to be rewritten to fit this new model. Eventually Microsoft caved under app vendor pressure and added the functionality to invoke processes into UWP (with limitations though). At this point they had a chance to do a proper from-scratch redesign for process invocation with the full wealth of knowledge we have obtained since the original design was written around 1982 or so. So can you guess whether they:

1. Created a proper process invocation function that takes an array of strings?
2. Exposed CreateProcess unaltered to UWP apps?

You guessed correctly.

Bonus chapter: msvcrt's execve functions

Some of you might have thought waitaminute, the Visual Studio C runtime does ship with functions that take string arrays so this entire blog post is pointless whining. This is true, it does provide said functions. Here is a pseudo-Python implementation for one of them. It is left as an exercise to the reader to determine why it does not help with this particular problem:

def spawn(cmd_array):

    cmd_string = ' '.join(cmd_array)

    CreateProcess(..., cmd_string, ...)

[1] That is to say, everything from here on may be completely wrong. Caveat lector. Do not quote me on this.

Some intricacies of ABI stability

There is a big discussion ongoing in the C++ world about ABI stability. People want to make a release of the standard that does a big ABI break, so a lot of old cruft can be removed and made better. This is a big and arduous task, which has a lot of "fun" and interesting edge, corner and hypercorner cases. It might be interesting to look at some of the lesser known ones (this post is not exhaustive, not by a long shot). All information here is specific to Linux, but other OSs should be roughly similar.

The first surprising thing to note is that nobody really cares about ABI stability. Even the people who defend stable ABIs in the committee do not care about ABI stability as such. What they do care about is that existing programs keep on working. A stable ABI is just a tool in making that happen. For many problems it is seemingly the only tool. Nevertheless, ABI stability is not the end goal. If the same outcome can be achieved via some other mechanism, then it can be used instead. Thinking about this for a while leads us to the following idea:

Since "C++ness" is just linking against libstdc++.so, could we not create a new one, say libstdc++2.so, that has a completely different ABI (and even API), build new apps against that and keep the old one around for running old apps?

The answer to this questions turns out to be yes. Even better, you can already do this today on any recent Debian based distribution (and probably most other distros too, but I have not tested). By default the Clang C++ compiler shipped by the distros uses the GNU C++ standard library. However you can install the libc++ stdlib via system packages and use it with the -stdlib=libc++ command line argument. If you go even deeper, you find that the GNU standard library's name is libstdc++.so.6, meaning that it has already had five ABI breaking updates.

So … problem solved then? No, not really.

Problem #1: the ABI boundary

Suppose you have a shared library built against the old ABI that exports a function that looks like this:

void do_something(const std::unordered_map<int, int> &m);

If you build code with the new ABI and call this function, the bit representation of the unordered map causes problems. The caller has a pointer to a bunch of bits in the new representation whereas the callee expects bits in the old representation. This code compiles and links but will invoke UB at runtime when called and, at best, crash your app.

Problem #2: the hidden symbols

This one is a bit complicated and needs some background information. Suppose we have a shared library foo that is implemented in C++ but exposes a plain C API. Internally it makes calls to the C++ standard library. We also have a main program that uses said library. So far, so good, everything works.

Let's add a second shared library called bar that also implemented in C++ and exposes a C API. We can link the main app against both these libraries and call them and everything works.

Now comes the twist. Let's compile the bar library against a new C++ ABI. The result looks like this:

A project mimicing this setup can be obtained from this Github repo. In it the abi1 and abi2 libraries both export a function with the same name that returns an int that is either 1 or 2. Libraries foo and bar check the return value and print a message saying whether they got the value they were expecting. It should be reiterated that the use of the abi libraries is fully internal. Nothing about them leaks to the exposed interface. But when we compile and run the program that calls both libraries, we get the following output snippet:

Foo invoked the correct ABI function.
Bar invoked the wrong ABI function.

What has happened is that both libraries invoked the function from abi1, which means that in the real world bar would have crashed in the same way as in problem #1. Alternatively both libraries could have called abi2, which would have broken foo. Determining when this happens is left as an exercise to the reader.

The reason this happens is that the functions in abi1 and abi2 have the same mangled name and the fact that symbol lookup is global to a process. Once any given name is determined, all usages anywhere in the same process will point to the same entity. This will happen even for non-weak symbols.

Can this be solved?

As far as I know, there is no known real-world solution to this problem that would scale to a full operating system (i.e. all of Debian, FreeBSD or the like). If there are any university professors reading this needing problems for your grad students, this could be one of them. The problem itself is fairly simple to formulate: make it possible to run two different, ABI incompatible C++ standard libraries within one process. The solution will probably require changes in the compiler, linker and runtime loader. For example, you might extend symbol resolution rules so that they are not global, but instead symbols from, say library bar would first be looked up in its direct descendents (in this case only abi2) and only after that in other parts of the tree.

To get you started, here is one potential solution I came up with while writing this post. I have no idea if it actually works, but I could not come up with an obvious thing that would break. I sadly don't have the time or know-how to implement this, but hopefully someone else has.

Let's start by defining that the new ABI is tied to C++23 for simplicity. That is, code compiled with -std=c++23 uses the new ABI and links against libstdc++.so.7, whereas older standard versions use the old ABI. Then we take the Itanium ABI specification and change it so that all mangled names start with, say, _^ rather than _Z as currently. Now we are done. The different ABIs mangle to different names and thus can coexist inside the same process without problems. One would probably need to do some magic inside the standard library implementations so they don't trample on each other.

The only problem this does not solve is calling a shared library with a different ABI. This can be worked around by writing small wrapper functions that expose an internal "C-like" interface and can call external functions directly. These can be linked inside the same library without problems because the two standard libraries can be linked in the same shared library just fine. There is a bit of a performance and maintenance penalty during the transition, but it will go away once all code is rebuilt with the new ABI.

Even with this, the transition is not a light weight operation. But if you plan properly ahead and do the switch, say, once every two standard releases (six years), it should be doable.

What is -pipe and should you use it?

Every now and then you see people using the -pipe compiler argument. This is particularly common on vintage handwritten makefiles. Meson even uses the argument by default, but what does it actually do? GCC manpages say the following:

-pipe
    Use pipes rather than temporary files for communication
    between the various stages of compilation.  This fails
    to work on some systems where the assembler is unable to
    read from a pipe; but the GNU assembler has no trouble.

So presumably this is a compile speed optimization. What sort of an improvement does it actually provide? I tested this by compiling LLVM on my desktop machine both with and without the -pipe command line argument. Without it I got the following time:

ninja  14770,75s user 799,50s system 575% cpu 45:04,98 total

Adding the argument produced the following timing:

ninja  14874,41s user 791,95s system 584% cpu 44:41,22 total

This is an improvement of less than one percent. Given that I was using my machine for other things at the same time, the difference is most likely statistically insignificant.

This argument may have been needed in the ye olden times of supporting tens of broken commercial unixes. Nowadays the only platform where this might make a difference is Windows, given that its file system is a lot slower than Linux's. But is its pipe implementation any faster? I don't know, and I'll let other people measure that.

The "hindsight is perfect" design lesson to be learned

Looking at this now, it is fairly easy to see that this command line option should not exist. Punting the responsibility of knowing whether files or pipes are faster (or even work) on any given platform to the user is poor usability. Most people don't know that and performance characteristics of operating systems change over time. Instead this should be handled inside the compiler with logic roughly like the following:

if(assembler_supports_pipes(...) &&

   pipes_are_faster_on_this_platform(...)) {

    communicate_with_pipes();

} else {

    communicate_with_files();

}

Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

Last week the laptop I use for macOS development said that there is an XCode update available. I tried to install it but it said that there is not enough free space available to run the installer. So I deleted a bunch of files and tried again. Still the same complaint. Then I deleted some unused VM images. Those would free a few dozen gigabytes, so it should make things work. I even emptied the trash can to make sure nothing lingered around. But even this did not help, I still got the same complaint.

At this point it was time to get serious and launch the terminal. And, true enough, according to df the disk had only 8 gigabytes of free space even though I had just deleted over 40 gigabytes of files from it (using rm, not the GUI, so things really should have been gone). A lot of googling and poking later I discovered that all the deleted files had gone to "reserved space" on the file system. There was no way to access those files or delete them. According to documentation the operating system would delete those files "on demand as more space is needed". This was not very comforting because the system most definitely was not doing that and you'd think that Apple's own software would get this right.

After a ton more googling I managed to find a chat buried somewhere deep in Reddit which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space. It consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch of command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any correlation to the thing that I wanted to do. But it did work and eventually I got XCode updated.

After my blood pressure dropped to healthier levels I got the strangest feeling of déjà vu. This felt exactly like using Linux in the early 2000s. Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best. Then it hit me.

This was not an isolated incidence. The parallels are everywhere. Observe:

External monitors

Linux 2000: plugging an external monitor will most likely not work. Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of monitor manufacturers for not providing modeline info.

Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work. Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of projector manufacturers for not ensuring that their HW works with every Apple model.

Software installation

Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.

Apple 2019: There is only True Way of installing software: using the Apple store. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.

Hardware compatibility

Linux 2000: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like 3D graphics cards. Things either don't work at all, have reduced functionality, or kinda work but fail spuriously every now and then for no discernible reason.

Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones. Things either don't work at all, have reduced functionality, or kinda work but fail spuriously every now and then for no discernible reason.

Technical support

Linux 2000: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Asking friends for assistance does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit.

Apple 2019: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Calling Apple's tech support line does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit.

Laptop features

Linux 2000: it is very difficult to find a laptop with more than two USB ports.

Apple 2019: it is very difficult to find a laptop with more than two USB ports.

Advocate behaviour

Linux 2000: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist computer nerds.

Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers.

A look into building C++ modules with a scanner

At CppCon there was a presentation on building C++ modules using a standalone dependency scanner executable provided by the compiler toolchain. The integration (as I understand it) would go something like this:

1. The build system creates a Ninja file as usual
2. It sets up a dependency so that every compilation job depends on a prescan step.
3. The scanner goes through all source files (using compilation_commands.json), determines module interdependencies and writes this out to a file in a format that Ninja understands.
4. After the scan step, Ninja will load the file and use it to execute commands in the correct order.

This seems like an interesting approach for experimentation, but unfortunately it depends on functionality that is not yet in Ninja. It is unclear if and when these would be added to Ninja, as its current maintainers are extremely conservative in adding any new code. It is quite difficult to run experiments on approaches that have neither usable code nor all the required features in various parts of the toolchain.

Can we do it regardless? Yes we can!

Enter self-modifying build system code

The basic approach is simple

1. Write a Ninja file as usual, but make all the top level commands (or, for this test, only all) run a secret internal command.
2. The command will do the scanning, and change the Ninja file on the fly, rewriting it to have the module dependency information.
3. Invoke Ninja on the new file giving it a secret target name that runs the actual build.
4. Build proceeds as usual.

The code that does this can be found in the vsmodtest branch in the main Meson repository. To run it you need to use Visual Studio's module implementation, the test project is in the modtest directory. It actually does work, but there are a ton of disclaimers:

• incremental builds probably won't work
• the resulting binary never finishes (it is running a job with exponential complexity)
• it does not work on any other project than the demo one (but it should be fixable)
• the dependencies are on object files rather than module BMI files due to a Ninja limitation
• module dep info is not cached, all files are fully rescanned every time
• the scanner is not reliable, it does the equivalent of dumb regex parsing
• any and all things may break at any time and if they do you get to keep both pieces

All in all nothing even close to production ready but a fairly nice experiment for ~100 lines of Python. This is of course a hack and should not go anywhere near production, but assuming Ninja gets all the required extra functionality it probably could be made to work reliably.

Is this the way C++ module building will work?

Probably not, because there is one major use case that this approach (or indeed any content scanning approach) does not support: code generation. Scanning assumes that all source code is available at the same time but if you generate source code on the fly, this is not the case. There would need to be some mechanism of making Ninja invoke the scanner anew every time source files appear and such a mechanism does not exist as far as I know. Even if it does there is a lot of state to transfer between Ninja and the scanner to ensure both reliable and minimal dependency scans.

There are alternative approaches one can take to avoid the need for scanning completely, but they have their own downsides.