@kha I have added support for opaque constants to the old C++ frontend,
and made sure the new frontend can still parse `library/init/core.lean`.
The kernel should enforce that opaque constants are really opaque, and
the following example should fail
```
constant x : nat := 0
theorem foo : x = 0 := rfl
```
If it doesn't, it is a bug.
Here are some remaining issues:
1- `environment.mk_empty` is currently an axiom because we cannot create
an inhabitant of an opaque type. A possible solution is to use
`option environment` instead of `environment`.
2- There is no support for opaque constants in the new
frontend. However, I modified it to handle axioms, and fixed the literal
values with decl_cmd_kind. I tried to mark some of my changes with
comments, but it is probably much easier for you to just check the
commit change list.
3- I did not add any support for automatically constructing `e`
at `constant x : t := e`. I think we can do this later
after we replace the old frontend with the new one. BTW, it took only a
few minutes to provide the inhabitants manually.
We cannot check the `[extern]` attribute because the auxiliary
declarations are compiled before we even define the main declaration
and set the attribute.
We should consider a better design in the future where we first define
all auxiliary and main definitions, then set the attributes, and then
compile the code.
cc @kha
We do not try to check whether code generation will succeed or not for
some declaration. In the future, we should probably rename it to
`nocode` or something similar.
cc @kha
We will re-implement the type class resolution algorithm, and the new
implementation will not rely on a persistent cache. We will improve
performance by:
1) Using better indexing data-structures.
2) Using a local cache during the search.
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.
