# Objective
This is an alternative to #17871 and #17701 for tracking issue #18155.
This thanks to @maniwani for help with this design.
The goal is to enable component ids to be reserved from multiple threads
concurrently and with only `&World`. This contributes to assets as
entities, read-only query and system parameter initialization, etc.
## What's wrong with #17871 ?
In #17871, I used my proposed staging utilities to allow *fully*
registering components from any thread concurrently with only
`&Components`. However, if we want to pursue components as entities
(which is desirable for a great many reasons. See
[here](https://discord.com/channels/691052431525675048/692572690833473578/1346499196655505534)
on discord), this staging isn't going to work. After all, if registering
a component requires spawning an entity, and spawning an entity requires
`&mut World`, it is impossible to register a component fully with only
`&World`.
## Solution
But what if we don't have to register it all the way? What if it's
enough to just know the `ComponentId` it will have once it is registered
and to queue it to be registered at a later time? Spoiler alert: That is
all we need for these features.
Here's the basic design:
Queue a registration:
1. Check if it has already been registered.
2. Check if it has already been queued.
3. Reserve a `ComponentId`.
4. Queue the registration at that id.
Direct (normal) registration:
1. Check if this registration has been queued.
2. If it has, use the queued registration instead.
3. Otherwise, proceed like normal.
Appllying the queue:
1. Pop queued items off one by one.
2. Register them directly.
One other change:
The whole point of this design over #17871 is to facilitate coupling
component registration with the World. To ensure that this would fully
work with that, I went ahead and moved the `ComponentId` generator onto
the world itself. That stemmed a couple of minor organizational changes
(see migration guide). As we do components as entities, we will replace
this generator with `Entities`, which lives on `World` too. Doing this
move early let me verify the design and will reduce migration headaches
in the future. If components as entities is as close as I think it is, I
don't think splitting this up into different PRs is worth it. If it is
not as close as it is, it might make sense to still do #17871 in the
meantime (see the risks section). I'll leave it up to y'all what we end
up doing though.
## Risks and Testing
The biggest downside of this compared to #17871 is that now we have to
deal with correct but invalid `ComponentId`s. They are invalid because
the component still isn't registered, but they are correct because, once
registered, the component will have exactly that id.
However, the only time this becomes a problem is if some code violates
safety rules by queuing a registration and using the returned id as if
it was valid. As this is a new feature though, nothing in Bevy does
this, so no new tests were added for it. When we do use it, I left
detailed docs to help mitigate issues here, and we can test those
usages. Ex: we will want some tests on using queries initialized from
queued registrations.
## Migration Guide
Component registration can now be queued with only `&World`. To
facilitate this, a few APIs needed to be moved around.
The following functions have moved from `Components` to
`ComponentsRegistrator`:
- `register_component`
- `register_component_with_descriptor`
- `register_resource_with_descriptor`
- `register_non_send`
- `register_resource`
- `register_required_components_manual`
Accordingly, functions in `Bundle` and `Component` now take
`ComponentsRegistrator` instead of `Components`.
You can obtain `ComponentsRegistrator` from the new
`World::components_registrator`.
You can obtain `ComponentsQueuedRegistrator` from the new
`World::components_queue`, and use it to stage component registration if
desired.
# Open Question
Can we verify that it is enough to queue registration with `&World`? I
don't think it would be too difficult to package this up into a
`Arc<MyComponentsManager>` type thing if we need to, but keeping this on
`&World` certainly simplifies things. If we do need the `Arc`, we'll
need to look into partitioning `Entities` for components as entities, so
we can keep most of the allocation fast on `World` and only keep a
smaller partition in the `Arc`. I'd love an SME on assets as entities to
shed some light on this.
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Co-authored-by: andriyDev <andriydzikh@gmail.com>
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