Faster Validation Through Immutability

Continuing the line of the thought from the previous post let’s see how immutability can help us reduce the cost of validation at runtime.

While :pre condition elision is nice we would prefer that the runtime behavior of our program during development not be so divergent from our production builds.

Immutable data coupled with innocuous mutation can give us what we want. All Clojure and ClojureScript data structures already adopt innocuous mutation in the form of hash code caching. By using the same idea we can achieve faster validation.

First let us imagine a function which takes two immutable maps that represent points and computes the distance:

( defn dist [ p0 p1 ] ( js/Math.sqrt ( + ( square ( - ( :x p0 ) ( :x p1 ))) ( square ( - ( :y p0 ) ( :y p1 ))))))

This looks good except of course if you pass the wrong type of value in.

So lets write a validating version. First we need to write the validator. We can do this trivially with core.match which simplifies writing fast validations through function application support.

( defn point? [ p ] ( match [ p ] [{ :x ( true :<< number? ) :y ( true :<< number? )}] true :else false ))

Now we can write the validating version of dist :

( defn dist [ p0 p1 ] { :pre [( point? p0 ) ( point? p1 )]} ( js/Math.sqrt ( + ( square ( - ( :x p0 ) ( :x p1 ))) ( square ( - ( :y p0 ) ( :y p1 ))))))

Excellent! The only problem is that this version is 2-3X slower than our previous version in many browsers.

The problem is actually quite deeper than a single function. We often structure our programs around data and many functions will likely take the exact same kind of data. In many functional programs perfectly valid data will likely flow through unchanged yet be subjected to needless checking at each step.

We can do better, read the following enhanced point validation implementation closely:

( defn point? [ p ] ( if ( and ( not ( nil? p )) ( keyword-identical? ( .-validated_ p ) ::point )) true ( match [ p ] [{ :x ( true :<< number? ) :y ( true :<< number? )}] ( do ( set! ( .-validated_ p ) ::point ) true ) :else false )))

We first check if the data structure has already been validated. Previously validated data structures now have a fast path.

If we haven’t validated the data structure before then we pattern match to check. In the successful case we tag the data structure with a namespaced keyword to avoid future validations.

What difference does this make? Click the Run Benchmark button below:

Run Benchmark

Eliminating Boilerplate

All the code above for the validator is pure boilerplate.

One of the most powerful aspects of Lisp is that we can use data to generate code. herbert is a beautiful succinct way to describe data structures.

We can easily write a macro validator that looks like the following that automatically generates the above validation that we wrote by hand with all of the discussed optimizations directly through a herbert data description.

( def point? ( validator ' { :x int :y int }))

Note that none of the above would work with mutable data structures. If a mutation occurred the validation tagging would become invalid.

And so we witness the beautiful intersection of Lisp and immutable data.