The idea behind it is described in detail in
https://github.com/prometheus/client_golang/issues/320 .
This commit also updates the example given in
promhttp/instrument_server_test.go , which nicely illustrates the
benefit of this change.
So far, currying could be emulated by creating different metric vec's
with different values in their ConstLabels. This was quite difficult
to grasp - which is essentially what was done in the example mentioned
above. Now that this use case can be solved without ConstLabels, we
can safely declare ConstLabels as rarely used. (Perhaps we can
deprecate them entirely one day, but I'll take a raincheck on that
when the changes of v0.10 have materialized.) This commit thus also
updates the ConstLabel doc comments in the various Opts. (It contained
fairly outdated stuff anyway.)
The "panic in case of error" code was so far in metricVec. This pulls
it up into the exported types like CounterVec. This is code
replication, but it avoids an explicit type conversion. Mostly,
however, this is preparation to make the wrapped metricVec an
interface (required for curried vec's).
Specifically @beorn7 pointed out that the previous implementation had
some shortcomings around large numbers. I've changed the code to match
the suggestion in review, as well as added a few test cases.
MetricVec is un-experted by now. godoc handles that correctly by
showing the methods of the embedded un-exported metricVec with the
exported type (CounterVec, SummaryVec, ...) that embeds metricVec.
This is in preparation for "curried" metric vecs, as discussed.
And it's a good thing anyway. The exported MetricVec was from a time
when I thought people would define own Metric types and then create
Vecs of it. That has never happened.
As it turned out, it's not that esay to guess "common" combination of
interface upgrades. So I decided to just implement all 32 possible
combination of interface upgrades. (Only 16 with Go 1.7 and earlier.)
Clearly, this calls for code generation. But right now, we still need
to find out what's the best form of the code. For later additions,
implementing code generation might be useful.
Note that newDelegator is called for each HTTP request. Thus, this
commit aims to make the upgrade selection quick. (After the type
checks, it's just directly accessing an element in a slice.)
The example method is assumed to be used as main() function. As a main()
function doesn't have any return values, the example doesn't compile and
is invalid.
beorn7