@kha I was working in the new declaration type and using tasks there.
Since we don't have tasks yet in Lean, I decided to start refactoring
the `thunk` type. I defined it as:
```
-- TODO(Leo): mark as opaque, it is implemented by the new runtime
structure thunk (α : Type u) : Type u :=
(fn : unit → α)
def thunk.pure {α : Type u} (a : α) : thunk α :=
⟨λ _, a⟩
def thunk.get {α : Type u} (t : thunk α) : α :=
t.fn ()
```
The idea is to use the runtime primitives to implement them.
Then, I realized the support for `thunk`s in the elaborator are quite
hacky. Given `f x`, if `f`'s domain has type `thunk A`, we elaborate
`f x` as `f (fun _, x)` even if `x` has type `thunk A`.
This is quite bad, for example, suppose we have
```
def f (x : thunk A) := ...
```
Then, the following definition is type incorrect.
```
def g (x : thunk A) := f x
```
and we are forced to write
```
def g (x : thunk A) := f (x ())
```
The term `f (x ())` will be elaborated as `f (fun _, x ())` and an
unnecessary closure is created at runtime.
This mechanism inherited from Lean 3 is also incompatible with the
new thunk definition. Given `x : thunk A`, I want to write `x.get`
to retrieve the value instead of `x ()` as in Lean 3.
However, `x.get` expands into the nonsensical `(fun _, x).get`.
So, I decided to view the mapping `A` to `thunk A` as a "coercion".
I used double quotes, because it is a macro instead of a function.
If it were a coercion, then we would be using `thunk.pure` to coerce
values but this is not we want most of the time.
For example, given `f : thunk A -> B` and a term `t : A`, when we write
`f t`, we want it to be converted into `f (fun _, t)` instead of
`f (thunk.pure t)` which would eagerly compute `t`. The transformation
`t` into `fun _, t` is syntactic.
We cannot implement it using type classes. I implemented it as
a hard-coded extra case like the one from `Prop` to `bool`.
We can also add a coercion from `thunk A` to `A` to avoid the `.get`.
That being said, I had a few breakages in the code base since we only
use coercions when the given and expected type do not contain
metavariables.
This flag was used by the kernel to decide whether the following
heuristic should be used to avoid unfolding `f` at `is_def_eq`.
f a =?= f b
-----------
a =?= b
This heuristic was introduced at Lean1 after a discussion with
Georges Gontier. Since this discussion, we added support for
caching failures of this heuristic. This proved to be much more
effective to attack the performance problems.
Moreover, we do not even use this flag in the `type_context::is_def_eq`
used during elaboration.
The current codebase contains only one place where this flag was set to
`false`: coercions generated at structure_cmd. This change was
made at commit
1c70514231
in the Lean2 codebase when we were not caching failures and
the kernel type checker was also used during elaboration.
