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.
Before this commit, we were inferring whether an
inductive/structure/class were meta or not. This was bad since the user
had no clue whether the type was trusted (non meta) or not.
Moreover, users could get confused by this behavior and assume the
kernel was allowing trusted code to rely on untrusted one.