Improving the constraint framework

Now that we've lived with the constraint framework for eight months there are some clearer paths towards improvement.

root-var

Now that the improved constraint framework and it's performance benefits are landed in master we should take a closer look at root-var and root-val. YourKit consistently shows these as the worst offenders with respect to "Own Time". The reason we need them is because of var aliasing. However we've already gone down the path of "rooting" all constraint parameters. Perhaps cgoal could do this step explicitly and construct the real constraint with only roots. This means that anything on the constraint call paths will be guaranteed to be a root making calls calls to root-var unnecessary. It seems we would still need root-val of course.

Disjunctive Constraints

Disequality is a disjunctive constraint. Currently our disequality implementation involves some ugliness and inefficiency because we cannot express disjunctive constraints in the current framework - only conjuctive constraints. We would like to express that some constraint is satisfied if even one of its subconstraints is satisfied. At the same time we would still like to reify disequality constraints in a straightforward manner.

Subsumed Constraints

If we gave each constraint an identifier we could know if a constraint is already in the constraint store.

(+fd x y z) ;; identifier [+fd x y z]

+fd here is a symbol and x, y, z are root vars. The constraint store could have a new field which simply stores this representation in a Clojure set.

Perhaps this system is good enough for disequality constraint subsumption since we'll be storing the subconstraints? If so we could avoid normalizing disequality constraints in the constraint store.