leanprover / leanprover/lean4

Partial function crashes when hidden behind a type class

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Description

Prerequisites

Please put an X between the brackets as you perform the following steps:

Description

Sorry for the cryptic title, I'm not 100% sure how to explain this. I've been playing around with a DSL embedded using a tagless-final style with typeclasses, and I managed to crash Lean with what seems like it should be a pretty innocuous piece of code. Here's the MWE (or at least as minimal as I could come up with):

class RandomChoice (m : Type → Type) where
  choose : (lo hi : Nat) → (h : lo ≤ hi) → m Nat

def RandomChoice.pick [Monad m] [RandomChoice m] (x y : m α) := do
  if (← choose 0 1 (by simp)) == 0 then x else y

open RandomChoice

def Gen (α : Type) := ∀ {m : Type → Type} [Monad m] [RandomChoice m], m α

instance : RandomChoice IO where
  choose lo hi _ := IO.rand lo hi

partial def Nat.arbitrary : Gen Nat := do
  pick
    (pure 0)
    (do
      let n ← Nat.arbitrary
      pure (n + 1))

def Gen.runIO (g : Gen α) : IO α := g

-- Works fine.
#eval (Nat.arbitrary : IO Nat)

-- This breaks!
#eval Gen.runIO Nat.arbitrary
Context

I encountered this when working with @nomeata on some partial_fixpoint stuff. Originally I thought this must be related to that, but it turns out it works with partial too. The type-class embedding I'm doing is pretty central to the approach, so unfortunately I don't have a good way to work around this problem.

Steps to Reproduce

See the example above. (Tested on nightly.)

Expected behavior: The second #eval behaves the same as the first.

Actual behavior: The second #eval crashes Lean.

Versions

Tested on the Lean online editor on nightly.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by running the minimal Lean example and compare the two #eval expressions, especially the Gen.runIO Nat.arbitrary path. Trace where the type-class-hidden partial function is handled and identify the crash entry point. Done means the second evaluation behaves like the first without crashing Lean.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
compilers
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Clearly specified
Newbie friendliness
28/100

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