Proposal: Replace strmangle with flect

[ccakes]

Per the contributing guidelines, raising an issue to discuss this before I start working on an implementation.

strmangle is a bit difficult to work with, it lacks a public API for modifying the predefined boilRuleset which makes it impossible for projects embeding sqlboiler to define their own acronyms and inflection rules (eg for industry-specific terms). strmangle looks like a simple wrapper around volatiletech/inflect which itself looks like a fork of markbates/inflect.

If you'd be open to replacing this machinery, gobuffalo/flect is a more modern inflection engine designed to replace the markbates package. I haven't looked into this at all but am happy to if a successful implementation is likely to be merged.

If I went ahead, the goals would be (roughly..):

• Functionally-compatible with sqlboiler@v4 - ie drop in replacement where all v4 tests pass.
  • If unable to make this work, then could target v5
• Expose functionality to library users to extend/modify the internal inflection rules

Thoughts?

[stephenafamo]

I'm not sure we have tests to check if strmangle works a specific way, so I would say if we are changing this package we just target v5 directly. Because if the inflection is different, then the generated code will no longer be backward compatible and we don't want that.

Personally, I am all for using a well-maintained 3rd party package instead of something that we have to maintain ourselves. However if we want to do this, we'd have to make sure that flect is the best choice (at least at the moment). Are there any other alternatives?

[stephenafamo]

So, I took some time to investigate this today.

The limitation of strmangle

The main issue you raised with strmangle was that it was difficult for users to add to the ruleset. While it is possible with flect, it doesn't matter since SQLBoiler runs as a CLI tool. We could add configuration options that help the user define more inflections, and by extension, we could add the necessary functions directly to strmangle to achieve this.

The performance of flect

While flect does work quite well some rudimentary benchmarks show it to be many many times slower than strmangle.

For title casing, it is 50 to 200 times slower in many cases, and for singular/plural inflection, it is about 1.4x slower for alphanumeric strings, and gets up to 5x slower once spaces or symbols are present.

Since there is no clear benefit of switching to flect, I'd say the bad performance is a deal breaker here.

[ccakes]

Sorry for the slow reply - based on performance I think your assessment makes sense.

While it is possible with flect, it doesn't matter since SQLBoiler runs as a CLI tool.

It is possible to call sqlboiler as a library which is what I'm doing, and tbh it works pretty well. The only frustrating hard boundary where a CLI is called is at the driver handoff.