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CPS-0013? | Better builtin data structures in Plutus (#638)
* CPS for better builtin datastructures in Plutus * match CIP title to broad, brief PR title * Address comments * fix missing Title term from YAML header * assign CPS number 13 --------- Co-authored-by: Robert Phair <rphair@cosd.com>
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CPS: 13 | ||
Title: Better builtin data structures in Plutus | ||
Status: Proposed | ||
Category: Plutus | ||
Authors: | ||
- Michael Peyton Jones <michael.peyton-jones@iohk.io> | ||
- Philip DiSarro <philip.disarro@iohk.io> | ||
- Pi Lanningham <pi@sundaeswap.finance> | ||
Discussions: | ||
Created: 2023-12-14 | ||
License: CC-BY-4.0 | ||
--- | ||
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## Abstract | ||
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Plutus Core lacks builtin data structures with good asymptotic performance for some use cases. | ||
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## Problem | ||
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Plutus Core has a few builtin data structures, but these are mostly used to make a minimally adequate representation of the `Data` type. | ||
It does not have builtin data structures optimized for performance. | ||
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Users can implement their own data structures (since Plutus Core is an expressive programming language), but in practice this has not happened much. | ||
In particular, we will focus on two examples here: | ||
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1. Arrays with constant-time lookup | ||
2. Maps with logarithmic-time lookup (also Sets, but we can treat them as a special case of Maps) | ||
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Both of these are difficult to implement in Plutus Core: | ||
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1. Arrays are (we believe) impossible without some kind of primitive with constant-time lookup | ||
2. Maps are possible but are typically moderately complex data structures which require a lot of code, and this has not been done in practice | ||
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## Use cases | ||
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### Arrays | ||
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#### Order matching | ||
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A common pattern in DEXs is to have a list of inputs/outputs to match up in a datum. | ||
In some cases the order is highly significant, e.g. earlier orders should be processed first, and the outcome of processing an earlier order may affect later ones. | ||
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For example, we might have: | ||
``` | ||
inputIdxs :: BuiltinList Integer | ||
outputIdxs :: BuiltinList Integer | ||
``` | ||
We then want to go through these lists, looking up the corresponding inputs and outputs and check some property (e.g. that the value is directly transferred from one to the other). | ||
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This requires a quadratic amount of work, which puts a low ceiling on how many orders can be processed at once. | ||
Empirically, many are capped at about 30, whereas if they were limited only by the amount of space in the transaction for inputs and outputs the limit would be hundreds. | ||
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If we had arrays with constant time indexing, we could make this linear instead. | ||
Note that unless we also implemented the "Data fields" suggestion below we would still need to do a linear amount of work to create arrays for the transaction inputs and outputs from the lists in the script context. | ||
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#### Data fields | ||
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The `Data` type has a `Constr` alternative which is used for encoding datatype constructors. | ||
This is used for encoding the script context, and is used by languages such as Aiken extensively for representing user-defined datatypes also. | ||
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The fields of the constructor are encoded in a list; hence to access a particular field the compiled code needs to do a linear amount of work. | ||
If the arguments to a `Constr` were an array, we could access the fields in constant time. | ||
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Similarly, the `List` and `Map` constructors of `Data` could use arrays. | ||
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### Maps | ||
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#### Operations on `Value` | ||
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The `Value` type is a nested map: it is a map from bytestrings (representing policy IDs) to maps from bytestrings (representing token names) to integers (representing quantities). | ||
Since map operations are currently linear, this means that even simple operations like checking whether one value is less than another can have quadratic cost. | ||
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This would be much better if map operations were logarithmic cost. | ||
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#### Indexing by party | ||
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Many applications have a known set of participants identified by some bytestring, typically a public key. | ||
It is therefore natural to store per-party state in a map indexed by the party identifier. | ||
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Since map operations currently have much worse complexity than a good map data structure (often linear/quadratic instead of logarithmic/linear), this is needlessly expensive and imposes a limit on the number of parties. | ||
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## Goals | ||
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1. Reduce the cost of operations on `Value` by a factor of 2-10 | ||
2. Reduce the cost of a matching algorithm such that we can handle hundreds of matches for the same cost it currently takes to do 30. | ||
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## Open questions | ||
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- Can we implement a set/map data structure in Plutus Core code that has acceptable performance and doesn’t require too much size overhead? | ||
- Do we need generic maps or is a map-from-bytestring sufficient? What about map-from-integer? | ||
- Generic maps are harder since we typically need to know how to order the key type | ||
- Is an array type useful even if it is immutable? | ||
- We are unlikely to be able to offer mutable arrays | ||
- Are builtin data structures useful enough even if they can only contain builtin types? | ||
- This would mean that complex data structures would have to be stored inside arrays as `Data`, rather than using Scott encoding or sum-of-products representation | ||
- Can we feasibly change the structure of the builtin `Data` type so that `Constr` arguments are in an array? | ||
- We would need to retain both versions for backwards compatibility | ||
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## References | ||
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- https://x.com/Quantumplation/status/1733298551571038338?s=20 |