Regardless of whether #16408 and #16311 pan out, this part is worth
pulling out as a separate PR.
Before, you had to define a new `IndexVec` index type for each type of
association list you wanted to create. Now there's a single index type
that's internal to the alist implementation, and you use `List<K, V>` to
store a handle to a particular list.
This also adds some property tests for the alist implementation.
This PR adds an implementation of [association
lists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_list), and uses them to
replace the previous `BitSet`/`SmallVec` representation for narrowing
constraints.
An association list is a linked list of key/value pairs. We additionally
guarantee that the elements of an association list are sorted (by their
keys), and that they do not contain any entries with duplicate keys.
Association lists have fallen out of favor in recent decades, since you
often need operations that are inefficient on them. In particular,
looking up a random element by index is O(n), just like a linked list;
and looking up an element by key is also O(n), since you must do a
linear scan of the list to find the matching element. Luckily we don't
need either of those operations for narrowing constraints!
The typical implementation also suffers from poor cache locality and
high memory allocation overhead, since individual list cells are
typically allocated separately from the heap. We solve that last problem
by storing the cells of an association list in an `IndexVec` arena.
---------
Co-authored-by: Carl Meyer <carl@astral.sh>
