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Niels Lohmann
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Comparing two values compared their containers, which compare their elements, which brought the comparison back once per nesting level. Two values nested deeply enough exhausted the call stack and terminated the process with a segmentation fault - the same bug as #5387, in the last operation that still had it. Worse, an ordered comparison took exponentially long in the nesting depth before C++20. std::vector's operator< is a lexicographical comparison, which asks whether an element is less than its counterpart and then whether the counterpart is less than it - two full comparisons of everything below that element, at every level. Comparing two equal values nested 30 levels deep, which is nothing unusual, took 3.8 seconds; 40 levels would have taken an hour, and nothing about the value has to be pathological to get there. C++20 is unaffected: std::lexicographical_compare_three_way asks once. Compare a value that is nested too deeply to descend into on an explicit stack instead, in a single pass that yields less, equal, greater or unordered at once. Equality and the three-way comparison descend as they always did for the first 128 levels, which nothing measurable costs them; an ordered comparison no longer descends at all, which is what takes the exponent out of it. Objects and arrays that are not nested deeply are otherwise compared exactly as before. The results are unchanged for every pair of values: 68121 comparisons of a corpus that covers NaN, discarded values, mixed number types, binary values, empty containers and both object types are identical to develop, in C++11, C++17 and C++20, with and without thread_local storage and legacy discarded comparison. Reproducing that meant reproducing two subtleties: a lexicographic comparison steps over a pair it cannot order, where a three-way comparison stops at it, and an object compares its keys with < where its entries are ordered but with == where they are only checked for equality - not with the object's own comparator, which for nlohmann::ordered_map tells equality. Equality needs no ordering, so it no longer asks for any: a key or string type that can only be compared for equality still works. Measured (medians of 7 interleaved runs, clang -O3, C++11): comparing two equal values nested 30 levels deep 3778 ms -> 0.002 ms; ordering flat objects -33.6%; ordering flat arrays of numbers +27.3%, the one shape that pays for the single pass; equality unchanged throughout. Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me>