@article{2021-egg,
author = {Willsey, Max and Nandi, Chandrakana and Wang, Yisu Remy and Flatt, Oliver and Tatlock, Zachary and Panchekha, Pavel},
title = {egg: Fast and Extensible Equality Saturation},
year = {2021},
issue_date = {January 2021},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
volume = {5},
number = {POPL},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3434304},
doi = {10.1145/3434304},
abstract = {An e-graph efficiently represents a congruence relation over many expressions. Although they were originally developed in the late 1970s for use in automated theorem provers, a more recent technique known as equality saturation repurposes e-graphs to implement state-of-the-art, rewrite-driven compiler optimizations and program synthesizers. However, e-graphs remain unspecialized for this newer use case. Equality saturation workloads exhibit distinct characteristics and often require ad-hoc e-graph extensions to incorporate transformations beyond purely syntactic rewrites. This work contributes two techniques that make e-graphs fast and extensible, specializing them to equality saturation. A new amortized invariant restoration technique called rebuilding takes advantage of equality saturation's distinct workload, providing asymptotic speedups over current techniques in practice. A general mechanism called e-class analyses integrates domain-specific analyses into the e-graph, reducing the need for ad hoc manipulation. We implemented these techniques in a new open-source library called egg. Our case studies on three previously published applications of equality saturation highlight how egg's performance and flexibility enable state-of-the-art results across diverse domains.},
journal = {Proc. ACM Program. Lang.},
month = jan,
articleno = {23},
numpages = {29},
keywords = {equality saturation, e-graphs}
}