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* Compare values without recursing, and without comparing them twice 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> * Describe comparison in the no-thread-local docs and CI target Comparing two values now bounds its descent with a thread_local counter just as copying does, so the JSON_NO_THREAD_LOCAL page, the macro overview and the ci_test_no_thread_local target cover both rather than copying alone. Also record what switching the macro on costs a comparison: on the benchmark documents, comparing two equal values takes 10% to 90% longer. Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me> * Take the descent flag as an argument rather than testing it MSVC reports the test of a constant as C4127 ("conditional expression is constant"), which the Windows builds treat as an error: may_descend is false for operator<, so the operand short-circuits the whole condition. Passing it to compare_descent_exhausted() puts the test where the value is an ordinary parameter, and leaves the call sites with no condition of their own. Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me> * Note the comparison fallback in the no-thread-local documentation The macro page describes what the library defines JSON_NO_THREAD_LOCAL for by itself in terms of copying alone; comparing falls back the same way. Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me> * Parenthesise the reserve() computation in the comparison test clang-tidy reports the mixed * and + as readability-math-missing- parentheses, as it does for the identical line in the copy test. Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me> * Use the shared descent bookkeeping rather than a second set Comparing kept a thread_local count, a limit and a guard of its own beside the ones copying already had, all three the same thing under a different name. They are gone; the shared count, limit and guard do the work. The guard grows a second constructor here, because the comparison operators are written as a macro and a macro cannot use the preprocessor: it cannot look the count up behind an #ifdef the way copy_structured does, so the guard looks it up for it. nesting_depth_exhausted() arrives for the same reason - whether an operator descends at all is a constant at every call site, and testing it there is what MSVC reports as C4127. Also say in compare_leaves what happens to a pair that is an array on one side and an object on the other, since the answer is not obvious from the code: an operator only descends into two values of the same type, so such a pair is told apart by its types alone - unequal, and ordered the way the types are - exactly as it is above the bound. And record what the explicit stack costs: the comparison operators are noexcept and the container comparison this replaces allocated nothing, so running out of memory here ends the process instead of throwing. It takes a value nested past the bound and an exhausted heap to reach, and the same comparison used to exhaust the call stack, but it is a new way to fail. Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me> * Amalgamate Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me> --------- Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me>