Simon Peyton Jones authored 5 years ago and Marge Bot committed 5 years ago

GHC has a wonderful-but-delicate mechanism for building recursive
dictionaries by adding a goal to the "solved dictionaries" before
solving the sub-goals.  See Note [Solved dictionaries] in TcSMonad

Ticket #17267 showed that if you use this mechanism for local
/quantified/ constraints you can get a loop -- or even unsafe
coerce.   This patch fixes the bug.

Specifically

* Make TcSMonad.addSolvedDict be conditional on using a
  /top level/ instance, not a quantified one.

* Moreover, we /also/ don't want to add a solved dict
  for equalities (a~b).

* Add lots more comments to Note [Solved dictionaries]
  to explain the above cryptic stuff.

* Extend InstanceWhat to identify those strange built-in
  equality instances.

A couple of other things along the way

* Delete the unused Type.isIPPred_maybe.

* Stop making addSolvedDict conditional on not being an
  impolicit parameter.  This comes from way back. But
  it's irrelevant now because IP dicts are never solved
  via an instance.