Why doesn't Case Class synthetic equals use ScalaRunTime._equals?

[cao...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I've been playing around with case classes a bit and discovered this SO post

http://stackoverflow.com/a/11396362/58005

and this gist reimplementing a case class manually,

https://gist.github.com/okapies/2814608

except that what I found from JADing a case class is that "ScalaRunTime._equals" isn't used for equality even though _hashCode/_toString and therefore the Product trait (and productArity/productElement) are used for toString and hashCode.

Is there any reason for this? 

Thanks,

Caoilte

[Antoine Gourlay]

Hmm, that’s interesting. Actually ScalaRunTime._equals hasn’t been used by case classes for a very long time:

It was used in Scala until v2.6, when it got disabled (16d3cf1) and then completely removed in v2.8 (76294e0). I don’t think that method is used anywhere now,

For reference, the code that generates the current implementation of equals is at SyntheticMethods.scala:203. The method’s scaladoc describes fairly well what you’ll get.

As to the reason for the change, those commit don’t mention anything…

The old implementation used productArity and productElement at runtime to enumerate the content of the case class. Maybe this was to remove the direct dependency on Product (case classes that don’t extend Product? who knows…), or to support people overriding those methods (although that’s madness)…

—

Antoine

​

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[Jason Zaugg]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 8:24 PM, Antoine Gourlay <ant...@gourlay.fr> wrote:

Hmm, that’s interesting. Actually ScalaRunTime._equals hasn’t been used by case classes for a very long time:

It was used in Scala until v2.6, when it got disabled (16d3cf1) and then completely removed in v2.8 (76294e0). I don’t think that method is used anywhere now,

For reference, the code that generates the current implementation of equals is at SyntheticMethods.scala:203. The method’s scaladoc describes fairly well what you’ll get.

As to the reason for the change, those commit don’t mention anything…

The old implementation used productArity and productElement at runtime to enumerate the content of the case class. Maybe this was to remove the direct dependency on Product (case classes that don’t extend Product? who knows…), or to support people overriding those methods (although that’s madness)…

I believe this is performance driven. Using the generic x.productIterator sameElements y.productIterator​
 can be quite a bit slower, especially if it incurs boxing.

-jason