Conservative array casting in conditional

[dime10]

In the context of JAX tracing, casting values to arrays automatically converts them to tracers, which means this value, and everything it interacts with, is now considered a dynamic program value. Being more conservative in this casting process, thus ensuring that static values remain static for longer, can be beneficial, e.g. for trace-time optimizations. This is especially true given that this is generally a one-way process, i.e. it is much easier to make a static value dynamic, than a dynamic value static.

[dime10]

Ah, this change has more impact than I thought. Whereas before the following:

        @qjit(autograph=True)
        def workflow(x):
            n = "fail"

            if n:
                y = x**2
            else:
                y = 0

would raise an error, because we were trying to cast a string to an array, it now succeeds because bool("fail") as a constant input to the catalyst if statement is totally fine.

Not sure if there are other opinions on this, but I'm leaning towards this change being fine?

[paul0403]

Ah, this change has more impact than I thought. Whereas before the following:

        @qjit(autograph=True)
        def workflow(x):
            n = "fail"

            if n:
                y = x**2
            else:
                y = 0

would raise an error, because we were trying to cast a string to an array, it now succeeds because bool("fail") as a constant input to the catalyst if statement is totally fine.

Not sure if there are other opinions on this, but I'm leaning towards this change being fine?

I think it's fine since this is just how regular python would work too? a.k. strings being used as some sort of condition

[dime10]

would raise an error, because we were trying to cast a string to an array, it now succeeds because bool("fail") as a constant input to the catalyst if statement is totally fine.
Not sure if there are other opinions on this, but I'm leaning towards this change being fine?

I think it's fine since this is just how regular python would work too? a.k. strings being used as some sort of condition

Turns out program capture already behaves this way too, so this is actually unifying the behaviour 👍

[codecov]

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 75.00000% with 1 line in your changes missing coverage. Please review.
✅ Project coverage is 97.00%. Comparing base (bea94d8) to head (74bb900).
⚠️ Report is 5 commits behind head on main.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
frontend/catalyst/api_extensions/control_flow.py	75.00%	1 Missing ⚠️

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main    #2892      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   97.01%   97.00%   -0.02%     
==========================================
  Files         167      167              
  Lines       18830    18872      +42     
  Branches     1770     1773       +3     
==========================================
+ Hits        18268    18306      +38     
- Misses        417      420       +3     
- Partials      145      146       +1     

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[rniczh]

👍