Create trait for builtins
we should standardize how we write builtins by using some trait that looks like this or something:
trait Builtin {
const sig: &'static str;
const no_typecheck: bool;
fn typecheck(
generics: &GenericParameters,
vars: &[VarInfo<F, LinearCombination<F>>],
span: Span,
) -> Result<()>;
fn builtin(
compiler: &mut CircuitWriter<R1CS<F>>,
_generics: &GenericParameters,
vars: &[VarInfo<F, LinearCombination<F>>],
span: Span,
) -> Result<Option<Var<F, LinearCombination<F>>>>;
}
and the typecheck() function could contain all of the actual checks that need to be done.
@mimoo I'm working on this issue and wanted to ask what type checks you mean?
This was an attempt to cleanly separate the circuit compilation with the typechecking pass, even for builtins.
As you can see the typecheck for function calls happen here: https://github.com/zksecurity/noname/blob/main/src/type_checker/checker.rs#L817
and we disable it for some builtins here: https://github.com/zksecurity/noname/pull/238 (you should probably base your PR on that one), so that the builtin can do it by itself. Initially I was thinking that we should just have Builtin::no_typecheck = False; but we ended up storing that information elsewhere in #238
you can see that since the function is written in Rust, we do some typechecking inside the builtin manually. For example assert_eq(T, T) should check that both arguments are of the same type https://github.com/zksecurity/noname/blob/main/src/stdlib/builtins.rs#L57
I was thinking that these typechecks could be factored out of that function and placed in their own function for cleanliness. But you can try to remove no_typecheck and typecheck from my example, and then we can see if it makes sense to introduce them later :o