WIP: Try making loading of mlir dynamic with importlib.

[ingomueller-net]

No description provided.

[webmiche]

I must admit, I don't fully understand how importing works exactly in python, but I am uncertain whether this will actually fix the problem. I am guessing that you would like to have a import mlir_iterators as mlir somewhere in the specific converter, which should overwrite the mlir that is used here to the one we actually want ot use. I did several such attempts trying to reimport a module using the same name and that never worked. And as mentioned, I don't actually understand in what sense this approach differs from mine other than having this extra file, which I don't quite understand the functionality off, since it does not seem to be adjustable to import from somewhere else.

[ingomueller-net]

Haha, true, the most interesting part is missing! In Line 1, I just import 'mlir'. What is interesting, is that this string can now be read from anywhere such as environment variables.

But I thought about this again. What I like about your approach is that it shows you don't need a string. I thought that maybe a combination of the two could be the best: keep a global variable, for example, named mlir in src/xdsl/config.py, which is initialized with __import__('mlir', fromlist=['*']). Then, all xDSL code has to use that variable instead of the global module name. This is similar to your class member variable but not bound to a class instance. Users can then still overwrite which module to use by overwriting that variable.

On the other hand, using a string has the advantage that the default mlir package does not need to exist if the string is changed even before attempting to import it.

[math-fehr]

I'm not sure I understand the problem you currently trying to fix. What do you mean by dynamically loading MLIR?

[ingomueller-net]

I'm not sure I understand the problem you currently trying to fix. What do you mean by dynamically loading MLIR?

I tried to explain it more precisely in #111.

[math-fehr]

Thanks, I understand more the problem now!

[math-fehr]

I answer my thoughts in #109, and I'm wondering if maybe one solution would be to use a "setup.py" file or something to create an module that would essentially just redirect to the right custom module.
I'm not certain if this is the right way, I'm just bouncing ideas.

[webmiche]

AFAIU, the setup.py is/was used to define requirements and depedencies s.t. a package can acually be installed (Source). I guess we could have people change a line in setup.py, when they want to change the module that they want to link to and then "reinstall" in a sense.

I think my vision of a solution is that there is somewhere a file, where you can change mlir to mlir_*something",which will then load the right thing. That file might be just simply the string and we read that file from somewhere else and import as a string. I'll try to implement something like that.

[ingomueller-net]

I guess I see how you can decide in setup.py which dependency you want to install but you still need to change import mlir in your sources. Is your plan to implement a preprocessor and modify the files upon installation? Apart from looking brittle, it sure does not work for your development copy where setup.py isn't used at all...

[webmiche]

I feel that the setup.py approach won't work or will at least be a huge struggle since it does not seem to be meant to be used like that... 🤔