Zero-Overhead Tree Processing with the Visitor Pattern

The Visitor Pattern is one of the most mis-understood of the classic design patterns. While it has a reputation as a slightly roundabout technique for doing simple processing on simple trees, it is actually an advanced tool for a specific use case: flexible, streaming, zero-overhead processing of complex data structures. This blog post will dive into what makes the Visitor Pattern special, and why it has a unique place in your toolkit regardless of what language or environment you are programming in.

About the Author: Haoyi is a software engineer, and the author of many open-source Scala tools such as the Ammonite REPL and the Mill Build Tool. If you enjoyed the contents on this blog, you may also enjoy the Author's book Hands-on Scala Programming

Json: a Strawman Data Structure

The Visitor Pattern operates on structured data: often, but not always, hierarchical or tree-like data structures. For the sake of this article, we will base our discussion on a subset of the JSON data format with only three kinds of value:

Strings: "hello" , without escapes, and without inner quotes (for simplicity)

, without escapes, and without inner quotes (for simplicity) Integers: 12345

Dictionaries: {"cow": "moo"} , mapping String to Json values

This should serve to illustrate the usage of the Visitor Pattern, without the overwhelming complexity of real data formats, and allow us to discuss the techniques and approaches in the limited confines of a blog post. The techniques described on this "Json-lite" format all apply to dealing with more complex real-world formats.

Modeling such a JSON tree structure in Scala code, we might write something like this:

abstract class Json case class Str(value: String) extends Json case class Num(value: Int) extends Json case class Dict(pairs: (String, Json)*) extends Json

Below are some example Json data structures, expressed in both their textual JSON format, as well as using the corresponding Scala data types defined above:

"hello"

Str("hello")

12345

Num(12345)

{"cow": "moo"}

Dict("cow" -> Str("moo"))

{ "hello": { "i am": {"cow": 1}, "you are": {"cow": 2} }, "world": 31337 "bye": "314" }

Dict( "hello" -> Dict( "i am" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(1)), "you are" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(2)) ), "world" -> Num(31337), "bye" -> Str("314") )

What is the Visitor Pattern

To begin with, let's assume that we have already parsed our Json from its textual input format into the Json data types defined above:

val tree = Dict( "hello" -> Dict( "i am" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(1)), "you are" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(2)) ), "world" -> Num(31337), "bye" -> Str("314") )

The most trivial use of the Visitor Pattern involves writing two things:

A Visitor class exposing methods that operate on each element in the Json tree

A dispatch function that recursively walks over the Json tree and calls the relevant method on Visitor

A Visitor for our JSON tree may look something like this:

abstract class Visitor[T]{ def visitStr(value: String): T def visitNum(value: Int): T def visitDict(): DictVisitor[T] } abstract class DictVisitor[T]{ def visitKey(key: String): Unit def visitValue(): Visitor[T] def visitValue(value: T): Unit def done(): T }

The contract of Visitor and DictVisitor is as follows:

For each JSON string, visitStr is called

is called For each JSON number, visitNum is called

is called For each JSON dictionary, visitDict is called

is called Within that JSON dictionary, visitKey is called for each key

is called for each key visitValue() is called before each dictionary value, and the Visitor it returns is used when visiting that value's JSON nodes

is called before each dictionary value, and the it returns is used when visiting that value's JSON nodes visitValue(value: T) is called on the result of the visiting that value

Exactly how "for each JSON {string, number, dictionary}" is implemented, is left to a separate dispatch function.

For now, I am assuming that Visitor is generic: its methods return a type T , representing the "output" of this Visitor . T will vary depending on what the concrete Visitor implementation is trying to do:

If it's meant to serialize the Json tree then T might be a String

If it's meant to redact sensitive keys from the input data, or convert number-like strings into proper numbers, then T might be Json .

If it's meant to perform some summary statistics on the Json tree, e.g. summing up all the numbers within it, then T might be an Int

Next, we have to write the dispatch function that takes both a Json tree, and a Visitor object, and calls the various methods on the Visitor depending on what it sees in the tree. For example:

def dispatch[T](input: Json, visitor: Visitor[T]): T = { input match{ case Str(value) => visitor.visitStr(value) case Num(value) => visitor.visitNum(value) case Dict(pairs @ _*) => val dictVisitor = visitor.visitDict() for((k, v) <- pairs){ dictVisitor.visitKey(k) val subVisitor = dictVisitor.visitValue() dictVisitor.visitValue(dispatch(v, subVisitor)) } dictVisitor.done() } }

Let's look at some concrete implementations for Visitor that accomplish the three things mentioned above:

StringifyVisitor

A simple Visitor that renders the Json structure to a String . Not as efficient as it could be - a production-quality serializer may want to build up the output using a StringBuilder or render directly to an output stream - but as an example it works well enough.

class StringifyVisitor extends Visitor[String]{ def visitStr(value: String) = "\"" + value + "\"" def visitNum(value: Int) = value.toString def visitDict() = new StringifyDictVisitor } class StringifyDictVisitor extends DictVisitor[String]{ val tokens = collection.mutable.Buffer("{") def visitKey(key: String) = { if (tokens.length > 1) tokens.append(",") tokens.append("\"" + key + "\"") tokens.append(":") } def visitValue() = new StringifyVisitor def visitValue(value: String) = { tokens.append(value) } def done() = { tokens.append("}") tokens.mkString } } println(dispatch(tree, new StringifyVisitor)) // {"hello":{"i am":{"cow":1},"you are":{"cow":2}},"world":31337,"bye":"314"}

RedactTreeVisitor

A simple Visitor that takes your Json structure and returns a new Json structure with the value of any dictionary-key named "hello" removed.

class RedactTreeVisitor extends Visitor[Json]{ def visitStr(value: String) = Str(value) def visitNum(value: Int) = Num(value) def visitDict() = new RedactTreeDictVisitor } class RedactTreeDictVisitor extends DictVisitor[Json]{ val pairs = collection.mutable.Buffer.empty[(String, Json)] var lastKey = "" def visitKey(key: String) = { lastKey = key } def visitValue() = new RedactTreeVisitor def visitValue(value: Json) = { if (lastKey != "hello") pairs.append(lastKey -> value) } def done() = Dict(pairs:_*) } println(dispatch(tree, new RedactTreeVisitor)) // Dict("world" -> Num(31337), "bye" -> Str("314"))

ToIntTreeVisitor

A simple Visitor that takes your Json structure and returns a new Json structure with any number-like strings converted into proper Json numbers

class ToIntTreeVisitor extends Visitor[Json]{ def visitStr(value: String) = { if (value.forall(_.isDigit)) Num(value.toInt) else Str(value) } def visitNum(value: Int) = Num(value) def visitDict() = new ToIntTreeDictVisitor } class ToIntTreeDictVisitor extends DictVisitor[Json]{ val pairs = collection.mutable.Buffer.empty[(String, Json)] var lastKey = "" def visitKey(key: String) = { lastKey = key } def visitValue() = new ToIntTreeVisitor def visitValue(value: Json) = { pairs.append(lastKey -> value) } def done() = Dict(pairs:_*) } println(dispatch(tree, new ToIntTreeVisitor)) // Dict( // "hello" -> Dict( // "i am" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(1)), // "you are" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(2)) // ), // "world" -> Num(31337), // "bye" -> Num(314) // )

SummationVisitor

A simple Visitor that adds up all the numbers within a Json tree and returns the sum:

class SummationVisitor extends Visitor[Int]{ def visitStr(value: String) = 0 def visitNum(value: Int) = value def visitDict() = new SummationDictVisitor } class SummationDictVisitor extends DictVisitor[Int]{ var sum = 0 def visitKey(key: String) = {} // do nothing def visitValue() = new SummationVisitor def visitValue(value: Int) = { sum += value } def done() = sum } println(dispatch(tree, new SummationVisitor)) // 31340

Visitor Pattern vs Recursive Transformations

So far, we have seen some ways of using the Visitor Pattern to process our Json trees. Nevertheless, in these simple cases, it seems like a very roundabout way of doing something really simple: I could just as easily have written simple functions that recurse over the Json tree and do what I want.

Here are sample implementations of stringify , redact , toInt and summation as simple recursive functions:

def stringify(input: Json): String = { input match{ case Str(value) => "\"" + value + "\"" case Num(value) => value.toString case Dict(pairs@_*) => val tokens = collection.mutable.Buffer("{") for((key, value) <- pairs){ if (tokens.length > 1) tokens.append(",") tokens.append("\"" + key + "\"") tokens.append(":") tokens.append(stringify(value)) } tokens.append("}") tokens.mkString } } println(stringify(tree)) // {"hello":{"i am":{"cow":1},"you are":{"cow":2}},"world":31337,"bye":"314"}

def redact(input: Json): Json = { input match{ case Str(value) => Str(value) case Num(value) => Num(value) case Dict(pairs@_*) => val newPairs = collection.mutable.Buffer.empty[(String, Json)] for((key, value) <- pairs){ if (key != "hello") newPairs.append(key -> redact(value)) } Dict(newPairs:_*) } } println(redact(tree)) // Dict("world" -> Num(31337), "bye" -> Str("314"))

def toInt(input: Json): Json = { input match{ case Str(value) => if (value.forall(_.isDigit)) Num(value.toInt) else Str(value) case Num(value) => Num(value) case Dict(pairs@_*) => val newPairs = collection.mutable.Buffer.empty[(String, Json)] for((key, value) <- pairs){ newPairs.append(key -> toInt(value)) } Dict(newPairs:_*) } } println(toInt(tree)) // Dict( // "hello" -> Dict( // "i am" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(1)), // "you are" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(2)) // ), // "world" -> Num(31337), // "bye" -> Num(314) // )

def summation(input: Json): Int = { input match{ case Str(value) => 0 case Num(value) => value case Dict(pairs@_*) => var total = 0 for((key, value) <- pairs) total += summation(value) total } } println(summation(tree)) // 31340

In doing so, I have accomplished the same outcome as we did earlier using the Visitor Pattern, but with a single function rather than one function and two classes! Here were are using Scala's match pattern matching syntax, but it could just as easily be done using Java's instanceof and (Str) casts, or Python's isinstance . What, then, is the point of all this Visitor stuff?

Chaining Recursive Functions

The recursive transformation functions written above can be chained: as long as the types line up, the output of one can be trivially fed into another, for example performing a summation after redaction, or stringifying the redacted Json trees:

println(summation(redact(tree))) // 31337 println(stringify(redact(tree))) // {"world":31337} println(summation(toInt(redact(tree)))) // 31651

However, there is a downside to this approach: each recursive transformation you chain in this way creates an entire intermediate Json tree structure to pass to the next transform in the chain. In the above examples there's only one intermediate tree - the output of redact - but you can easily imagine chains of transformations with dozens of stages: redact some sensitive data, convert all strings to lowercase, sort the keys of the dictionaries, etc. In such cases, creating and throwing away dozens of intermediate trees is wasteful and can be a performance bottleneck.

There is a solution to this problem: to fuse the different recursive transformations together manually. For example, you may fuse summation and toInt and redact into a single redactToIntSum function as follows:

def redactToIntSum(input: Json): Int = { input match{ case Str(value) => if (value.forall(_.isDigit)) value.toInt else 0 case Num(value) => value case Dict(pairs@_*) => var total = 0 for((key, value) <- pairs) { if (key != "hello"){ total += redactToIntSum(value) } } total } } println(redactToIntSum(tree)) // 31651

This gets us the efficiency we want - we no longer are constructing an intermediate tree in redact just to pass it to toInt , and construction and intermediate tree in toInt just to pass to summation - but at a cost of flexibility. We have to manually fuse the recursive transformation we want into a single function and can no longer mix-and-match the different transforms as we'd like. Manually fusing all possible combinations would require O(n!) different fused functions, which quickly becomes unfeasible.

Chaining Visitors

Like recursive functions, Visitors can also be chained. A slight modification is necessary to the RedactTreeVisitor above to make this possible:

class RedactVisitor[T](downstream: Visitor[T]) extends Visitor[T]{ def visitStr(value: String) = downstream.visitStr(value) def visitNum(value: Int) = downstream.visitNum(value) def visitDict() = new RedactDictVisitor(downstream.visitDict()) } class RedactDictVisitor[T](downstream: DictVisitor[T]) extends DictVisitor[T]{ var lastKey = "" def visitKey(key: String) = { lastKey = key if (lastKey != "hello") downstream.visitKey(key) } def visitValue() = new RedactVisitor[T](downstream.visitValue()) def visitValue(value: T) = { if (lastKey != "hello") downstream.visitValue(value) } def done() = downstream.done() }

Which can then be chained with e.g. StringifyVisitor or SummationVisitor as follows:

println(dispatch(tree, new RedactVisitor(new StringifyVisitor))) // {"world":31337,"bye":"314"} println(dispatch(tree, new RedactVisitor(new SummationVisitor))) // 31337

Note how the above code is slightly different from the RedactVisitor we saw earlier: rather than immediately constructing a Json value to return, it simply forwards to a downstream: Visitor[T] and returns whatever T the downstream 's methods return.

A similar change could be made to ToIntTreeVisitor :

class ToIntVisitor[T](downstream: Visitor[T]) extends Visitor[T]{ def visitStr(value: String) = { if (value.forall(_.isDigit)) downstream.visitNum(value.toInt) else downstream.visitStr(value) } def visitNum(value: Int) = downstream.visitNum(value) def visitDict() = new ToIntDictVisitor(downstream.visitDict()) } class ToIntDictVisitor[T](downstream: DictVisitor[T]) extends DictVisitor[T]{ def visitKey(key: String) = downstream.visitKey(key) def visitValue() = new ToIntVisitor[T](downstream.visitValue()) def visitValue(value: T) = downstream.visitValue(value) def done() = downstream.done() }

Which allows us to chain both ToIntVisitor and RedactVisitor together:

println(dispatch(tree, new RedactVisitor(new ToIntVisitor(new SummationVisitor)))) // 31651

Like recursive transformations, Visitors can be chained in arbitrary ways using the downstream argument: this makes it just as easy to compose whatever computation you want out of smaller, independent parts.

Unlike chaining recursive transformations like redact / toInt / summation , chaining Visitors does not produce any intermediate trees: you simply feed in the original tree , and in one pass it computes the redaction/toInt/summation and produces a result. You do not need to manually fuse the computations into a single function if you want it to be efficient!

Streaming Sources

Above, we have already seen how Visitor s are much more verbose than manually writing recursive transformation functions, but with an upside: you can chain Visitor s together to combine their transformations without needing to construct intermediate data structures, and without needing to manually write code to fuse the transformations you want into a single, big function.

However, one assumption we have made so far is that we are starting from the already-parsed, structured data in-memory: the Json classes defined above. This is often not the case in reality! In reality, often you are starting from some kind of serialized data format: text files, binary data coming over a network, etc.. For now, let's just consider the textual form of our Json format:

{ "hello": { "i am": {"cow": 1}, "you are": {"cow": 2}, }, "world": 31337, "bye": "314" }

To convert this into our Json data structure, we will need a parser. A simple parser might look something like this:

class Parser{ var offset: Int = 0 val DOUBLE_QUOTE = 34.toChar def whitespace(input: String) = { while(input(offset).isWhitespace) offset += 1 } def parse(input: String): Json = { if(input(offset) == DOUBLE_QUOTE) Str(parseStr(input)) else if(input(offset).isDigit) Num(parseNum(input)) else if(input(offset) == '{') parseDict(input) else ??? } def parseNum(input: String) = { val start = offset while(input(offset).isDigit) offset += 1 input.slice(start, offset).toInt } def parseStr(input: String) = { val start = offset offset += 1 while(input(offset) != DOUBLE_QUOTE) offset += 1 offset += 1 input.slice(start + 1, offset - 1) } def parseDict(input: String): Dict = { val pairs = collection.mutable.Buffer.empty[(String, Json)] offset += 1 var done = false while(!done){ whitespace(input) val key = parseStr(input) whitespace(input) assert(input(offset) == ':', input(offset) -> offset) offset += 1 whitespace(input) val value = parse(input) pairs.append(key -> value) whitespace(input) if (input(offset) == '}') done = true offset += 1 } Dict(pairs:_*) } } def parse(input: String) = new Parser().parse(input)

Used as follows:

val input = """{ "hello": { "i am": {"cow": 1}, "you are": {"cow": 2} }, "world": 31337, "bye": "314" }""" val data = parse(input) // Dict( // "hello" -> Dict( // "i am" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(1)), // "you are" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(2)) // ), // "world" -> Num(31337) // ) println(summation(redact(tree))) // 31337 println(stringify(redact(tree))) // {"world":31337,"bye":"314"}

It might seem obvious that a Parser parses an input string into some kind of tree structure for further processing, but there is another alternative: the Parser could instead take a Visitor to dispatch to! This looks like the following:

class DispatchParser{ var offset: Int = 0 val DOUBLE_QUOTE = 34.toChar def whitespace(input: String) = { while(input(offset).isWhitespace) offset += 1 } def parse[T](input: String, visitor: Visitor[T]): T = { if(input(offset) == DOUBLE_QUOTE) visitor.visitStr(parseStr(input)) else if(input(offset).isDigit) visitor.visitNum(parseNum(input)) else if(input(offset) == '{') parseDict(input, visitor.visitDict()) else ??? } def parseNum(input: String) = { val start = offset while(input(offset).isDigit) offset += 1 input.slice(start, offset).toInt } def parseStr(input: String) = { val start = offset offset += 1 while(input(offset) != DOUBLE_QUOTE) offset += 1 offset += 1 input.slice(start + 1, offset - 1) } def parseDict[T](input: String, dictVisitor: DictVisitor[T]): T = { offset += 1 var done = false while(!done){ whitespace(input) val key = parseStr(input) dictVisitor.visitKey(key) whitespace(input) assert(input(offset) == ':', input(offset) -> offset) offset += 1 whitespace(input) val value = parse(input, dictVisitor.visitValue()) dictVisitor.visitValue(value) whitespace(input) if (input(offset) == '}') done = true offset += 1 } dictVisitor.done() } } def dispatchParse[T](input: String, visitor: Visitor[T]) = { new DispatchParser().parse(input, visitor) }

Effectively, rather than having a dispatch function recurse over a structured Json tree and call the Visitor 's methods, we have a dispatchParse function than parses over the un-structured Json text and dispatches calls to the Visitor s methods. The Visitor s themselves do not care who is calling their methods as long as they are called in the same order, so they should behave the same - and produce the same result - either way.

You can use this DispatchParser as follows:

println(dispatchParse(input, new StringifyVisitor())) // {"hello":{"i am":{"cow":1},"you are":{"cow":2}},"world":31337,"bye":"314"} println(dispatchParse(input, new SummationVisitor())) // 31340 println(dispatchParse(input, new RedactVisitor(new SummationVisitor()))) // 31337

What's happening here is worth calling out explicitly: we are processing the Json data without ever parsing it into a full tree structure!

In the first case, we are constructing the minified output string while the input string is still being parsed.

In the second case, we are summing up the numbers in the Json during the parse.

In the third, we are feeding the Json through the redactor, then summing up the remaining numbers

All three computations above happen without constructing any Json tree structure: by paying the verbosity cost of using the Visitor pattern instead of writing recursive computations on the Json tree, in exchange we get the ability to run our computations on raw input data without needing to parse/store the entire data structure in memory.

Tree Construction Visitors

ToIntVisitor and RedactVisitor above can be chained into downstream visitors, to combine their computations but without constructing intermediate data structures. Sometimes this is what you want, but sometimes it isn't: sometimes you actually do want to spit out a Json structure. Apart from maintaining two versions of ToIntVisitor and RedactVisitor - one chainable and one not - what can we do?

It turns out the solution is simple: define a Visitor that does nothing but constructs the Json tree structure! It looks something like this:

class ConstructionVisitor extends Visitor[Json]{ def visitStr(value: String) = Str(value) def visitNum(value: Int) = Num(value) def visitDict() = new ConstructionDictVisitor } class ConstructionDictVisitor extends DictVisitor[Json]{ val pairs = collection.mutable.Buffer.empty[(String, Json)] var lastKey = "" def visitKey(key: String) = { lastKey = key } def visitValue() = new ConstructionVisitor def visitValue(value: Json) = { pairs.append(lastKey -> value) } def done() = Dict(pairs:_*) }

Now, if you want a version of RedactVisitor or ToIntVisitor that constructs a Json tree, simply chain it to ConstructionVisitor :

dispatchParse(input, new RedactVisitor(new ConstructionVisitor())) // Dict("world" -> Num(31337), "bye" -> Str("314")) dispatchParse(input, new ToIntVisitor(new ConstructionVisitor())) // Dict( // "hello" -> Dict( // "i am" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(1)), // "you are" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(2)) // ), // "world" -> Num(31337), // "bye" -> Num(314) // )

Furthermore, you can now trivially convert the Visitor -based DispatchParser into a Json tree-building Parser , just by providing it a ConstructionVisitor :

dispatchParse(input, new ConstructionVisitor()) // Dict( // "hello" -> Dict( // "i am" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(1)), // "you are" -> Dict("cow" -> Num(2)) // ), // "world" -> Num(31337) // "bye" -> Str("314") // )

Previously, defining Visitor -based transformations rather than a recursive-transformation-function based API was a tradeoff: you could chain them to other Visitor s for zero-overhead streaming processing, but you lost the ability to construct concrete structures in the case that is what you wanted. With ConstructionVisitor , the tradeoff is gone: your Visitor -based transforms can now be trivially converted into tree-building transformations simply by chaining the together with ConstructionVisitor !

Composability

So far we have defined two dispatchers:

dispatchParse("...", _)

dispatch(tree, _)

Two chainable visitors:

RedactVisitor

ToIntVisitor

And three non-chainable "terminal" Visitors:

StringifyVisitor

SummationVisitor

ConstructionVisitor

What makes the Visitor Pattern so flexible is the way you can plug & play these simple components any way you like, performing operations on trees:

dispatch(tree, new SummationVisitor) performs a summation over the tree

Serializing trees to raw text:

dispatch(tree, new StringifyVisitor)

Parsing raw text into trees::

dispatchParse(text, new ConstructionVisitor)

Zero-overhead chaining of multiple operations without intermediate trees:

dispatch(tree, new RedactVisitor(new StringifyVisitor)) serializes a tree to a minified string with redacted keys/values removed

dispatch(tree, new ToIntVisitor(new SummationVisitor)) performs a summation over the tree after converting number-like strings to numbers

dispatch(tree, new RedactVisitor(new ToIntVisitor(new SummationVisitor))) performs a summation over the tree after converting number-like strings to numbers and removing all redacted keys/values

dispatch(tree, new RedactVisitor(new ToIntVisitor(new ConstructionVisitor))) Construct with new tree with all number-like strings converted to numbers and all redacted keys/values removed, without any intermediate trees

Directly performing operations on raw text, without constructing a tree:

dispatchParse(text, new StringifyVisitor) performs a streaming re-formatting of raw input text into minified text

dispatchParse(text, new SummationVisitor) performs a streaming summation over raw input text

Perform chained, zero-overhead operations directly on raw input text:

dispatchParse(text, new RedactVisitor(new StringifyVisitor)) performs a streaming redaction directly on the raw input text

dispatchParse(text, new ToIntVisitor(new SummationVisitor)) performs a streaming summation over the raw input text after converting number-like strings to numbers

dispatchParse(text, new RedactVisitor(new ToIntVisitor(new SummationVisitor))) performs a summation over the raw input text after converting number-like strings to numbers and removing all redacted keys/values

We have paid a cost in complexity: rather than writing e.g. a single recursive def redact(input: Json): Json function, we had to write a dispatch functions and pair of RedactorVisitor classes.

In exchange we get the flexibility of chaining different recursive-transformation functions one after the other, but with zero-overhead as if we had manually merged those transformations into a single function. Furthermore, all our Visitor machinery can work regardless of dispatcher, so we can implement dispatchParse and immediately have the ability to do streaming computations directly on raw input text, without ever parsing it into a complete tree structure, with all of our existing Redact / ToInt / Stringify / Summation operations immediately available for us to use for free!

Further work using the Visitor Pattern

There are further interesting things you can do with the Visitor pattern that I will touch on but not go into too deeply:

Syntax Validation

You can define a new terminal visitor that does nothing:

class NoOpVisitor extends Visitor[Unit]{ def visitStr(value: String) = () def visitNum(value: Int) = () def visitDict() = new NoOpDictVisitor } class NoOpDictVisitor extends DictVisitor[Unit]{ def visitKey(key: String) = () def visitValue() = new NoOpVisitor() def visitValue(value: Unit) = () def done() = () }

And combine it with dispatchParse to allow zero-overhead validation of raw input text without constructing a throw-away JSON tree:

val text = """{ "hello": "cow", "world": { "foo": "bar", "bar": 123 } }""" dispatchParse(text, new NoOpVisitor) // no result! val brokenText = """{ "hello": "cow", "world": { "foo": "bar", "bar" 123 } }""" dispatchParse(brokenText, new NoOpVisitor) // java.lang.AssertionError: assertion failed: (1,62)

Validating that serialized data follows a particular format is a common task. Most people would use a parser to parse the input and report any errors, and simple throw away the data structure the parser generates: a workable but somewhat wasteful solution. Using the Visitor Pattern, we can simply combine our existing DispatchParser that we used for streaming computations with a NoOpVisitor and get a zero-overhead syntax validator entirely for free

Data Mapping

Another common thing to do is to parse JSON into instances of classes to use in your application. perhaps you want to convert:

{ "hello": "cow", "world": { "foo": "bar", "bar": 123 } }

Into an instance of the class:

case class Thingy(hello: String, world: Inner) case class Inner(foo: String, bar: Int)

You can use this a set of Visitors to create Thingy and Inner :

class LiteralVisitor extends Visitor[Any]{ def visitStr(value: String) = value def visitNum(value: Int) = value def visitDict() = ??? } abstract class InstantiatorVisitor extends Visitor[Any]{ def visitStr(value: String) = ??? def visitNum(value: Int) = ??? def done(values: Seq[Any]): Any def visitDict() = new InstantiatorDictVisitor(done, visitors) def visitors: Map[String, Visitor[Any]] } class InstantiatorDictVisitor(outerDone: Seq[Any] => Any, visitors: Map[String, Visitor[Any]]) extends DictVisitor[Any]{ var lastKey = "" val values = collection.mutable.Buffer.empty[Any] def visitKey(key: String) = { lastKey = key } def visitValue() = visitors(lastKey) def visitValue(value: Any) = { values.append(value) } def done(): Any = outerDone(values) } class ThingVisitor extends InstantiatorVisitor{ def visitors = Map( "hello" -> new LiteralVisitor, "world" -> new InnerVisitor ) def done(values: Seq[Any]) = new Thingy( values(0).asInstanceOf[String], values(1).asInstanceOf[Inner] ) } class InnerVisitor extends InstantiatorVisitor{ def visitors = Map( "foo" -> new LiteralVisitor, "bar" -> new LiteralVisitor ) def done(values: Seq[Any]) = new Inner( values(0).asInstanceOf[String], values(1).asInstanceOf[Int] ) }

Which can be used both to construct Thingy s from Json trees:

val tree = parse("""{ "hello": "cow", "world": { "foo": "bar", "bar": 123 } }""") dispatch(tree, new ThingVisitor).asInstanceOf[Thingy] // Thingy("cow", Inner("bar", 123))

And to construct Thingy s from raw Json text, without the intermediate tree:

val text = """{ "hello": "cow", "world": { "foo": "bar", "bar": 123 } }""" dispatchParse(text, new ThingVisitor).asInstanceOf[Thingy] // Thingy("cow", Inner("bar", 123))

Doing your data mapping straight from raw input text to your class instances can easily double the throughput compared to first parsing your text into a Json tree.

You can similarly re-serialize your class instances back to Json using the Visitor Pattern as well. Simply define a dispatcher:

def dispatchInstance[T](value: Thingy, visitor: Visitor[T]): T

And you can immediately start using it to serialize your class instances either to Json trees:

dispatchInstance(Thingy("cow", Inner("bar", 123)), new ConstructionVisitor) // Dict( // "hello" -> Str("cow"), // "world" -> Dict("foo" -> Str("bar"), "bar" -> Num(123)) // )

Or directly to an output string:

dispatchInstance(Thingy("cow", Inner("bar", 123)), new StringifyVisitor) // {"hello":"cow","world":{"foo":"bar","bar":123}}

Again with zero-overhead from intermediate trees. dispatchInstance itself can be implemented in a variety of different ways: using reflection, using type-classes, etc. but for now is left as an exercise to the reader.

True Streaming IO

Above, our dispatchParse function starts dispatching to the visitor from an in-memory String :

def dispatchParse[T](input: String, visitor: Visitor[T]): T

It is not difficult to make an equivalent dispatchParseStream that can work on JSON coming from arbitrary java.io.InputStream s:

def dispatchParseStream[T](input: java.io.InputStream, visitor: Visitor[T]): T

Similarly, while the StringifyVisitor above accumulates the result in-memory as a String , you could easily define a OutputStreamVisitor that streams the output directly to a `java.lang.OutputStream:

class OutputStreamVisitor(output: java.io.OutputStream) extends Visitor[Unit]{ ... }

This would allow you to perform streaming processing parses on Json data that may be too large to fit in memory: you could perform a summation, validation or directly off a file on disk without ever loading the whole file into memory:

// Validate JSON on disk dispatchParseStream(new java.io.FileInputStream("big.json"), new NoOpVisitor) // Sum up numbers from JSON on disk dispatchParseStream(new java.io.FileInputStream("big.json"), new SummationVisitor) // Redact JSON from disk to another file on disk dispatchParseStream( new java.io.FileInputStream("big.json"), new RedactVisitor( new OutputStreamVisitor(new java.io.FileOutputStream("big-redacted.json")) ) )

All of these capabilities come entirely free: our previous RedactVisitor , SummationVisitor and NoOpVisitor are entirely unchanged, but thanks to the Visitor Pattern are now able to perform their computations in a 100% streaming fashion.

And of course, once you're working with InputStream s and OutputStream s we can now perform streaming JSON processing directly over the network either as well!

The exact implementations of dispatchParseStream and OutputStreamVisitor are left as an exercise for the reader.

What's the Visitor Pattern All About?

The Visitor Pattern gives you flexible, streaming, zero-overhead processing of complex data structures. While composable tree-transforming functions give you the flexibility but without the efficiency, and manually-fusing operations in one big function gives you the efficiency without the flexibility. The Visitor Pattern gives you the best of both worlds, while allowing your computations to happen in a streaming fashion where there isn't a concrete data-structure at all!

Libraries like the ASM Bytecode Engineering Library and the uPickle JSON serialization library make heavy use of the visitor pattern to implement their complex, performant bytecode and JSON transformations. While this blog post uses JSON-lite processing as an example, the same principles apply to any sort of processing of complex data structures

If you are just doing a simple computation using a concrete data structure, it does not make sense to use the Visitor Pattern: just define a recursive function using isinstanceof and do what you want directly.

Where the Visitor Pattern shines is when your computation is neither simple, nor on a concrete data structure:

If you want to break up a complex transformation on a complex data structure into multiple smaller computations, but don't want to wastefully generate a bunch of intermediate data structures

If you want to perform computations on data that doesn't have any concrete data structure at all: performing your computations in a streaming fashion, dispatched directly from the parser reading a file or over the network, and never having the entire input or output dataset in memory

If you have either of these requirements, the Visitor Pattern is for you.

About the Author: Haoyi is a software engineer, and the author of many open-source Scala tools such as the Ammonite REPL and the Mill Build Tool. If you enjoyed the contents on this blog, you may also enjoy the Author's book Hands-on Scala Programming