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Use C++20 three-way comparison everywhere #164

Merged
merged 18 commits into from
Aug 19, 2024
Merged

Use C++20 three-way comparison everywhere #164

merged 18 commits into from
Aug 19, 2024

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tcbrindle
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C++20 adds the "spaceship" operator which not only gives us three-way comparison, but also provides information about whether a type is strongly, weakly, or only partially ordered.

Many Flux algorithms require that a comparator models a strict weak ordering over the elements of a sequence. Up until now (with the exception of the compare() function) we have followed the STL/ranges model of having our comparators returning bool if one element is "less than" other. With this PR, we now require that a comparator returns a value of type std::weak_ordering.

The goal is to help users writing "proper" comparators; with a bool-returning function, it's very easy to accidentally write a comparator which is not a proper strict weak order. While this is still possible in the new model, it seems like it would be far less likely.

One particular change is that it's no longer possible to sort a vector of floats or doubles using the default comparator, because floating point types are only partially ordered. This is by design. Floating point data that contains NaNs will break sort() and other functions that expect a weak ordering. With this change, users can now provide std::strong_order as a custom comparator to use the IEEE total order, or std::weak_order (which is the same, but treats positive and negative zero as equivalent), or std::weak_order_fallback to get the same behaviour as before if they're absolutely sure that the data does not contain NaNs.

Fixes #158

Also, don't #include <flux/core/numeric.hpp> in utils.hpp
Rather than using a boolean "less-than" comparator (defaulting to std::ranges::less), we'll use what C++20 gives us and require a comparator that returns `std::weak_ordering`, defaulting to std::compare_three_way.

We'll also require that both arguments are the same type (ignoring cvref qualifiers), because I'd prefer explicit conversions rather than implicit conversions that mixed-type comparisons probably require.

Finally, we'll add `flux::cmp::compare` as a default-constructed `std::compare_three_way` that can be passed as a comparator without needing to construct it.
Given an N-ary callable f (where N>=2), flip(f) returns an N-ary function object which, when invoked, calls f with the first two arguments swapped.

So, for example, flip(f)(a, b) calls f(b, a), and flip(f)(a, b, c, d) calls f(b, a, c, d).
This is just flip(cmp::compare), but reads nicely when passed as a comparator
* Change strict_weak_order_for concept to use ordering_invocable<..., std::weak_ordering> rather than std::strict_weak_order
* Change all default comparators from std::ranges::less to std::compare_three_way
* Change all comparator usages from if(invoke(cmp, a, b)) to if (invoke(cmp, a, b) < 0)
* Update custom comparators in tests/examples
* in flux::sort, wrap the given comparator in a function object that just does std::is_lt(cmp(a, b)) rather than making lots of changes to pdqsort
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codecov bot commented Jan 30, 2024

Codecov Report

All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests ✅

Project coverage is 98.30%. Comparing base (5da160f) to head (ee8a5c3).
Report is 19 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files
@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##             main     #164   +/-   ##
=======================================
  Coverage   98.30%   98.30%           
=======================================
  Files          70       70           
  Lines        2471     2479    +8     
=======================================
+ Hits         2429     2437    +8     
  Misses         42       42           

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There's still a lot of documentation that I actually need to *write*, of course...
These do the same as cmp::min/max, but accept arguments that are only partially_ordered, arbitrarily returning the first argument for min, or the second argument for max in the case where the arguments are unordered.
@tcbrindle tcbrindle merged commit 1e67ddf into main Aug 19, 2024
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@tcbrindle tcbrindle deleted the pr/comparators branch November 5, 2024 18:59
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Consistent comparisons
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