leanprover / leanprover/lean4

RFC: improving performance of `deriving Hashable` on single-field structures

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RFC
Dominant language
Lean
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Description

Proposal

The hash produced by deriving Hashable on a single-field structure should be the same as the hash of the field type.

Currently, these two types have very different hashes, where the structure hash has a large slowdown compared to the other one:

abbrev T := Nat

structure U where
  value: Nat
deriving Hashable

On our benchmarks that rely a lot on hashmaps, going from U to T lead to a 2x slowdown overall, whereas the two types are representing exactly the same thing.

Manually deriving the Hashable removes that slowdown, and I believe this implementation should be the one generated by deriving Hashable

instance : Hashable U where
  hash u := hash u.value
Impact

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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

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by locating the deriving Hashable implementation and relevant benchmarks, then determine how single-field structures are handled; done means the generated hash matches the field hash without regressing other derived instances.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
compilers
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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