Equality Saturation Tactic for Lean
This repository contains a (work-in-progress) equality saturation tactic for Lean based on egg. This egg
tactic is useful for automated equational reasoning based on given equational theorems.
Setup
The egg
tactic requires Rust and its package manager Cargo.
They are easily installed following the official guide.
To use egg
in your Lean project, add the following line to your lakefile.toml
:
[[require]]
name = "egg"
git = "https://github.com/marcusrossel/lean-egg"
rev = "main"
... or the following line to your lakefile.lean
:
require "marcusrossel" / "egg" @ git "main"
Then, add import Egg
to the files that require egg
.
Basic Usage
The syntax of egg
is very similar to that of simp
or rw
:
import Egg
example : 0 = 0 := by
egg
example (a b c : Nat) (h₁ : a = b) (h₂ : b = c) : a = c := by
egg [h₁, h₂]
open List in
example (as bs : List α) : reverse (as ++ bs) = (reverse bs) ++ (reverse as) := by
induction as generalizing bs with
| nil => egg [reverse_nil, append_nil, List.append]
| cons => egg [*, append_assoc, reverse_cons, List.append]
But you can use it to solve some equations which simp
cannot:
import Egg
variable (a b c d : Int)
example : ((a * b) - (2 * c)) * d - (a * b) = (d - 1) * (a * b) - (2 * c * d) := by
egg [Int.sub_mul, Int.sub_sub, Int.add_comm, Int.mul_comm, Int.one_mul]
Sometimes, egg
needs a little help with finding the correct sequence of rewrites.
You can help out by providing guide terms which nudge egg
in the right direction:
import Mathlib.Algebra.Group.Defs
import Egg
example [Group G] (a : G) : a⁻¹⁻¹ = a := by
egg [/- group axioms -/] using a⁻¹ * a
If you need more control, you can use egg calc
to specify a chain of equations:
-- From `Lean/Egg/Tests/Freshman Calc.lean`
import Egg
example [CharTwoRing α] (x y : α) : (x + y) ^ 3 = x ^ 3 + x * y ^ 2 + x ^ 2 * y + y ^ 3 := by
egg calc [/- axioms of ring of characteristic 2 -/]
_ = (x + y) * (x + y) * (x + y)
_ = (x + y) * (x * (x + y) + y * (x + y))
_ = (x + y) * (x ^ 2 + y ^ 2)
_ = x * (x ^ 2 + y ^ 2) + y * (x ^ 2 + y ^ 2)
_ = (x * x ^ 2) + x * y ^ 2 + y * x ^ 2 + y * y ^ 2
_ = _
For conditional rewriting, hypotheses can be provided alongside rewrites:
import Egg
example {p q r : Prop} (h₁ : p) (h₂ : p ↔ q) (h₃ : q → (p ↔ r)) : p ↔ r := by
egg [h₁, h₂, h₃]
Note that rewrites are also applied to hypotheses.
Related Work
- Lean Together 2025: "Egg: An Equality Saturation Tactic in Lean" is a talk which motivates the use cases of the
egg
tactic. - An Equality Saturation Tactic for Lean contains a detailed description of the tactic's inner workings as of June 2024.
- Guided Equality Saturation introduces the original prototype of the
egg
tactic. - Bridging Syntax and Semantics of Lean Expressions in E-Graphs contains a high-level description of how the tactic handles binders and definitional equality.