Changing the Set internals makes a lot of sense as it saves doing
conversions in multiple places and gives a central place to alter
the key when a item is computed.
This will have no side effects other then that the ordering is now
based on strings instead on integers, so the order will be different.
This will however have no effect on existing configs as these will
use the individual codes/keys and not the ordering to determine if
there is a diff or not.
Lastly (but I think also most importantly) there is a fix in this PR
that makes diffing sets extremely more performand. Before a full diff
required reading the complete Set for every single parameter/attribute
you wanted to diff, while now it only gets that specific parameter.
We have a use case where we have a Set that has 18 parameters and the
set consist of about 600 items (don't ask 😉). So when doing a diff
it would take 100% CPU of all cores and stay that way for almost an
hour before being able to complete the diff.
Debugging this we learned that for retrieving every single parameter
it made over 52.000 calls to `func (c *ResourceConfig) get(..)`. In
this function a slice is created and used only for the duration of the
call, so the time needed to create all needed slices and on the other
hand the time the garbage collector needed to clean them up again caused
the system to cripple itself. Next to that there are also some expensive
reflect calls in this function which also claimed a fair amount of CPU
time.
After this fix the number of calls needed to get a single parameter
dropped from 52.000+ to only 2! 😃
We need to set the value to an empty value so the state file does
indeed change the value. Otherwise the obsolote value is still
intact and doesn't get changed at all. This means `terraform show`
still shows the obsolote value when the particular value is not
existing anymore. This is due the AWS API which is returning a null
instead of an empty string.
This fixes some perpetual diffs I saw in Atlas AccTests where an empty
map (`map[string]interface{}{}`) was being `d.Set` for "metadata_full".
Because the MapFieldWriter was not distinguishing between empty and nil,
this trigger the "map delete" logic and no count was written to the
state. This caused subsequent plans to improperly report a diff.
Here we redefine the map delete functionality to explicitly trigger only
on `nil`, so we catch the `.#` field for empty maps.
Paul Hinze