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constants.md

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Constants in the type system

Constants used in the type system are represented as ty::Const. The variants of their ty::ConstKind mostly mirror the variants of ty::TyKind with the two additional variants being ConstKind::Value and ConstKind::Unevaluated.

Unevaluated constants

This section talks about what's happening with feature(generic_const_exprs) enabled. On stable we do not yet supply any generic parameters to anonymous constants, avoiding most of the issues mentioned here.

Unless a constant is either a simple literal, e.g. [u8; 3] or foo::<{ 'c' }>(), or a generic parameter, e.g. [u8; N], converting a constant to its ty::Const representation returns an unevaluated constant. Even fully concrete constants which do not depend on generic parameters are not evaluated right away.

We do not eagerly evaluate constant as they can be used in the where-clauses of their parent item, for example:

#[feature(generic_const_exprs)]
fn foo<T: Trait>()
where
    [u8; <T as  Trait>::ASSOC + 1]: SomeOtherTrait,
{}

The constant <T as Trait>::ASSOC + 1 depends on the T: Trait bound of its parents caller bounds, but is also part of another bound itself. If we were to eagerly evaluate this constant while computing its parents bounds this would cause a query cycle.

Generic arguments of anonymous constants

Anonymous constants inherit the generic parameters of their parent, which is why the array length in foo<const N: usize>() -> [u8; N + 1] can use N.

Without any manual adjustments, this causes us to include parameters even if the constant doesn't use them in any way. This can cause some interesting errors and breaks some already stable code.

To deal with this, we intend to look at the generic parameters explicitly mentioned by the constants and then search the predicates of its parents to figure out which of the other generic parameters are reachable by our constant.

TODO: Expand this section once the parameter filtering is implemented.

As constants can be part of their parents where-clauses, we mention unevaluated constants in their parents predicates. It is therefore necessary to mention unevaluated constants before we have computed the generic parameters available to these constants.

To do this unevaluated constants start out with substs_ being None while assuming that their generic arguments could be arbitrary generic parameters. When first accessing the generic arguments of an unevaluated constants, we then replace substs_ with the actual default arguments of a constants, which are the generic parameters of their parent we assume to be used by this constant.