P4 @name annotations contain perhaps-unsupported characters

[jafingerhut]

It is not clear to me yet, but perhaps open source p4c and/or its P4Runtime API implementation might not support characters in @name annotations that are not legal P4 identifiers. For example, it might not support the | character in this annotation:

DASH/dash-pipeline/bmv2/dash_pipeline.p4

Line 201 in 611a15f

@name("pa_validation|dash_pa_validation")

See this p4c issue where @fruffy has been facing difficulties in this area: p4lang/p4c#3885

[chrispsommers]

Hi Andy, @marian-pritsak would have more to say on this, but so far I am not aware of any problems resulting from the current DASH annotations. Also be aware that there is/was work underway to address #276 by adding custom annotations to direct the SAI code generator and remove the @name(x|y) approach.

[fruffy]

Thanks for opening this issue @jafingerhut. Yes, this issue is largely internal and will only become a problem when the IR is serialized into .p4 or .json file.

[r12f]

ok, with the latest updates in DASH, all usage of "|" or ":" in the name are removed. we should not have this issue anymore. @jafingerhut and @fruffy do you have any other concerns on the name?

[fruffy]

Yes, we also fixed this problem with a couple compiler fixes for the inlining pass. Thanks for keeping track of this!

[r12f]

Np at all! I guess we can finally get this long running issue closed! 🎉

[KrisNey-MSFT]

Closing per thread