Before this commit they were implemented using C++ and Lean.
A Lean procedure was being invoked for each subterm of the input term.
This is one of the performance problems at issue #1646.
Here are the runtimes for size 7 in the example described at issue #1646.
Before this commit:
tactic execution took 7.48s
elaboration of some_lifted_lets took 11.5s
type checking time of some_lifted_lets took 33.4ms (aka QED time)
total execution time: 16.841s
After this commit:
tactic execution took 4.96s
elaboration of some_lifted_lets took 7.6s
type checking time of some_lifted_lets took 31.1ms (aka QED time)
total execution time: 12.785s