Based on the insights of relational e-matching and egglog0, I’ve been attempting to embed e-graphs into Souffle datalog on and off for over a year. Here’s some relevant previous posts in that direction:

• Encoding E-graphs to Souffle Datalog Points out that datalog easy expressed some subproblems in equality saturation. Rebuilding (congruence closure and canonicalization) is clearly some kind of fixed point operation. E-matching is a kind of graph matching and datalog is one of the most convenient languages for graph matching I know. Looking back at this post, it seems like I understood a lot of things even back then. I’m not sure why it has taken so long for this idea to work. I grew discouraged and switched to overlaying datalog on top of egg (egglog0)
• Naive E-graph Rewriting in Souffle Datalog Naive encoding using ADTs - Very straightforward, however does not at all properly share pieces the way egraphs do. Nice for conceptual modelling, but this is ultimately unacceptable.
• A Questionable Idea: Hacking findParent into Souffle with User Defined Functors - The first attempt at hacking a union find primitive into Souffle as an awkward untrustworthy backdoor. In this last encoding, using ADTs somewhat clunked up the representation. ADTs are in general to better way to generate new objects in datalog as compared to the autoinc() counter. This is because ADTs hash cons themselves, so you won’t generate the same ADT twice. This improves termination and database size significantly. This intuition seems to have failed me here. autoinc() is now ok, but only because of the unusual stratified datalog encoding.

The toy benchmark problem that I’ve been using is associativity and commutativity of 1 + 2 + … 9. These embeddings were ultimately failures, because they were just plain too slow, like a minute or nonterminating.

But I have a different encoding which is slightly different. And it is competitive with egg itself in speed I think!

Here is the output of the latest encoding running in souffle compiled mode with parallel -j 4

phil:~/Documents/prolog/soffule/egraphexist\$ time ./run_comp.sh

real    0m0.544s
user    0m1.779s
sys     0m0.063s


It saturates quickly and 18660 = 3^9-2^10+1 is the correct number of enodes of a fully associative commutative egraph expansion of 1 + 2 + ... 9 . See previous blog post for explanation of this calculation.

### Idea 1: External Fixedpoint

Egg uses a fixedpoint of ematch -> rebuild -> repeat. This is a good idea because it is really important to keep your egraph free of junk and rebuilding does that. Rebuilding shrinks the egraph, ematching often grows it. The actual space of terms being represented is horrifically exponential and an unrebuilt egraph starts to see that.

To express this in datalog, we need a notion of scoped or nested fixedpoints. Typically datalog mashes everything (or at least each strata / scc of relation dependence) into a big single fixedpoint. It seems that allowing this will make the egraph get too unclean too quickly as evidenced by the slowness of the previous blog post.

One way to achieve this is to put a fixedpoint at the “bash” level. If we write our datalog program to take in a database and output a database, we can run souffle in a bash for-loop until saturation.

This can be implemented by making a separate input and output relation that feed into the same file in souffle.

.input add0


### Idea 2: External UnionFind

The external unionfind is an idea that I tried in the previous blog post and failed, but I think it is now a key ingredient.

One big problem with the hacked in external unionfind is that it adds an imperative operational dependence that is impossible to reason about. Souffle is free to shred it’s rules in whatever way it likes and it does. What has especially bitten me in the past is assuming that foo,biz.baz in the head “foo(x), biz(x), baz(x) :- gum(x)” have to occur temporally near each other. They do not. Souffle immediately expands this rule at the very first stage into 3 simpler rules.

One thing we actually can kind of count on is souffle to obey stratification. We can basically guarantee that if strata n relies on a relation produced in strata m, m < n, then souffle really will calculate strata m first.

It is definitely possible (easier even) to build a datalog that mashes all strata together (in the absence of negation), but souffle doesn’t because it is more efficient to finish strata one at a time.

In particular, the interplay of the imperative unionfind and subsumption. It was to my great pleasure that subsumption actually seems to hurt rather than help on my examples. I’m glad to leave it behind, but we’ll see.

It is ok to not fully complete congruence closure, but it is not obviously ok to not complete canonicalization of ids if we are blowing up the union find on every iteration with the above mentioned bash loop. The union find lives in the souffle process and we are shutting it down and restarting it. The strata ordering is enough to guarantee this though. This also has the benefit of filtering out anything stale that may be in add1, removing one of the needs for subsumption.

add1(@findRoot(x),@findRoot(y),@findRoot(z)) :- add(x,y,z).


### Idea 3: The Dirty Relation

The basic congruence closure algorithm is easily expressible in datalog. This is part of the compelling case for using datalog to implement egraphs

eq(z,z1) :- add(x,y,z), add(x,y,z1), z != z1.


However, we aren’t really using an eq that datalog understands or is aware of. So datalog doesn’t know that adding to eq could trigger more rebuilding.

A mechanism by which to help datalog along is the add a dirty relation.

add(@findNode(x),@findNode(y),@findNode(z)) :- add(x,y,z), (true; dirty(x) ; dirty(y)).
dirty(@unionNodes(z,z1)), dirty(z), dirty(z1) :- add(x,y,z), add(x,y,z1), z1 != z, (true; dirty(x) ; dirty(y)).


the underlying seminaive delta_dirty relation is plahying a role analagous to the dirty worklist in egg. Relational joining dirty on add is achieving a lookup similar to using the parents table in egg.

Now, as written there is no guarantee that dirty will fully rebuild add. But this is ok because of mentioned in idea 2.

add1(@findRoot(x),@findRoot(y),@findRoot(z)) :- add(x,y,z).


Failing to fully complete congruence closure appears to not be a disaster.

To be fully honest, I fiddled with where to put dirtys until it worked well. I am not entirely clear that I shouldn’t have more.

If you want a more complete rebuild, it is possible to tag dirty(x,iter) with extra integers in such a way that you can double dirty. It is not clear that even this technique is fully congruence closing, so buyer beware.

### Idea 4: Separate autoinc() rules and rewrite rules

Still rebuilding is leaky and needs to be nursed, so we need to go out of our way to not put unnecessary pressure on it.

My go to example for testing ideas in egraph’s is commutativity and associativity of addition. Commutativity a + b = b + a is a very simple rule. There are no joins that need to happen and no new eclasses ever need to be generated

add(y,x,xy) :- add0(x,y,xy).


Associativity a + (b + c) = (a + b) + c is much more complex. It has a join and does sometimes need to generate a new id.

Naively this works.

add(y,z,autoinc()) :- add0(_x,y,xy), add0(xy,z,_xyz).


However this is putting unnecessary pressure on rebuilding, generating new names that will need to be congruenced. Instead we can seperate this into two rules per direction (this idea came from discussions with Max, Zach, Yihong). One rule generates the necessary id to complete the rewrite if it doesn’t exist (the awkward count guard), and the other looks up the id and uses it, more similar to the commutativity example.

// generate new ids needed for certain rules



It is not entirely clear this idea is 100% crucial. Perhaps the other ideas are enough to make rebuilding strong enough to handle unnecssary autoinc here.

Note also the maxid0 predicate which is shown below, which is necessary because we need to generate fresh ids and autoinc’s state is not retained between souffle runs.

## Code

.pragma "libraries" "unionfind"
.decl add0(x:number, y : number, z : number)
.decl add(x:number, y : number, z : number)
.decl add1(x : number, y : number, z : number)
.decl maxid0(x : number)
.decl id0(x : number)
.decl dirty(z : number)
.functor findNode(number):number
.functor unionNodes(number,number):number

// should go in separate file

// calculate fresh id offset

maxid0(x) :- x = 1 + max t : id0(t).

// generate new ids needed for certain rules

// Ematch for rewrites

dirty(@unionNodes(z,z1)), dirty(z), dirty(z1) :- add(x,y,z), add(x,y,z1), z1 != z, (true; dirty(x) ; dirty(y)).
// Wait what. Getting rid of the dirty iter number still works?

//add1 is a least canonicalized, if perhaps impartially congruenced.



Runner script:

rm add0.facts
for i in {0..10}
do
done


The small unionfind shim to attach to souffle’s unionfind impl.

#include <cstdint>
#include "souffle/CompiledSouffle.h"
#include "souffle/datastructure/UnionFind.h"

extern "C"
{

souffle::SparseDisjointSet<int32_t> ds = souffle::SparseDisjointSet<int32_t>();

int32_t unionNodes(int32_t x, int32_t y)
{
ds.unionNodes(x, y);
return ds.findNode(y);
}
int32_t findNode(int32_t x)
{
return ds.findNode(x);
}
}

all: add_uf rebuild libunionfind.so

souffle-compile.py -l unionfind -L . add_uf.cpp

rebuild: rebuild2.dl libunionfind.so
souffle -g rebuild rebuild2.dl -j 8
souffle-compile.py -l unionfind -L . rebuild.cpp

libunionfind.so: unionlib.cpp
/usr/bin/c++ -march=native -fopenmp -O3 -DUSE_NCURSES -DUSE_LIBZ -DUSE_SQLITE -fopenmp \
-std=c++17 -o unionlib.o -c -fPIC unionlib.cpp \
-I../../souffle/build/src/../include -I../../souffle/build/src/include \
-I../../souffle/build/src/../include/souffle/swig -I../../souffle/build/src/include/souffle/swig \
-I/home/philip/Documents/prolog/souffle/src/include
g++ -shared -o libunionfind.so unionlib.o



You can also run in Souffle’s compiled mode which gives a 2-4x speedup in my experience.

rm add0.facts
make
for i in {0..8}
do
# give LD_LIBRARY_PATH the path to libunionfind.so
done


## Bits and Bobbles

Thanks to Yihong, Remy, Max, and Zach, whose ideas are interspersed throughout here.

Souffle already supports an eqrel union find backed equivalence relation. The problem with it is it does not support the findRoot operation. Perhaps if there was a way to expose this to surface souffle, all would be well. It is also not quite desirable to have seminaive semantics for the eqrel. This means findRoot might be slightly stale. It is absolutely key in my experience so far to never choke yourself with stupidly stale ids. Maybe the eqrel could also have an associated dirty relation? This is in some sense delta_eq which already exists under the hood? eq(x,x) could play the role of dirty?

Here is just spitballing some plausible syntax.

.decl myeq(x : number, y : number) eqrel
foo(myeq.find(3)).


Edit: 6/20/22

Actually subsumption based union find works good too. This maintains a root relation that relates an eclass id to the minimum id in it’s equivalence class. This is faster and requires no external library. The essential point seems to be the external fixed point and careful stratification.

I mentioned the subsumption based union find in this tweet https://twitter.com/SandMouth/status/1489397285784113157?s=20&t=pKfRAZm2ntOBujJccw8eUg This tweet is also I think what put me in contact with the egg folks. It alllll comes around.

.decl add0(x:number, y : number, z : number)
.decl add(x:number, y : number, z : number)
.decl add1(x : number, y : number, z : number)
.decl maxid0(x : number)
.decl id0(x : number)
.decl root(x : number, y : number)

// should go in separate file

// calculate fresh id offset

maxid0(x) :- x = 1 + max t : id0(t).

// generate new ids needed for certain rules

// Ematch for rewrites

// Hmm. A little awkward I can't use add0?

// canonical element is minimum number in equiv class
root(x, y) <= root(x, y1) :- y1 <= y.

// way slower. Huh.

//add1 is projection of only roots
// allow through if not in union find at all also
`