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37 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
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# Deprecate getfenv/setfenv
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## Summary
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Mark getfenv/setfenv as deprecated
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## Motivation
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getfenv and setfenv are problematic for a host of reasons:
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- They allow uncontrolled mutation of global environment, which results in deoptimization; various important performance features
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like builtin calls or imports are disabled when these functions are used.
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- Because of the uncontrolled mutation code that uses getfenv/setfenv can't be typechecked correctly; in particular, injecting new
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globals is going to produce "unknown globals" warnings, and modifying existing globals can trivially violate soundness wrt type
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checking
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- While these functions can be used for good (once you ignore the issues above), such as custom module systems, statistically speaking
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they are mostly used to obfuscate code to hide malicious intent.
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## Design
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We will mark getfenv and setfenv as deprecated. The only consequence of this change is that the linter will start emitting warnings when they are used.
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Removing support for getfenv/setfenv, while tempting, is not planned in the foreseeable future because it will cause significant backwards compatibility issues.
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## Drawbacks
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There are valid uses for getfenv/setfenv, that include extra logging (in Roblox code this manifests as `getfenv(1).script`), monkey patching for mocks in unit tests, and custom
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module systems that inject globals into the calling environment. We do have a replacement for logging use cases, `debug.info`, and we do have an officially recommended replacement
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for custom module systems, which is to use `require` that doesn't result in issues that fenv modification carries and can be understood by the type checker, we do not have an
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alternative for mocks. As such, testing frameworks that implement mocking via setfenv/getfenv will need to use `--!nolint DeprecatedGlobal` to avoid this warning.
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## Alternatives
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Besides the obvious alternative "do nothing", we could also consider implementing Lua 5.2 support for _ENV. However, since we do not have a way to load script files other than
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via `require` that doesn't support _ENV, and `loadstring` is supported but discouraged, we do not currently plan to implement `_ENV` although it's possible that this will happen
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in the future.
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