Month: October 2014

Space-Efficient Manifest Contracts at POPL 15

Papers, Programming LanguagesLeave a comment

I am delighted to announce that Space-Efficient Manifest Contracts will appear at POPL 2015 in Mumbai. Here’s the abstract:

The standard algorithm for higher-order contract checking can lead to unbounded space consumption and can destroy tail recursion, altering a program’s asymptotic space complexity. While space efficiency for gradual types—contracts mediating untyped and typed code—is well studied, sound space efficiency for manifest contracts—contracts that check stronger properties than simple types, e.g., “is a natural” instead of “is an integer”—remains an open problem.

We show how to achieve sound space efficiency for manifest contracts with strong predicate contracts. The essential trick is breaking the contract checking down into coercions: structured, blame-annotated lists of checks. By carefully preventing duplicate coercions from appearing, we can restore space efficiency while keeping the same observable behavior.

The conference version is a slightly cut down version of my submission, focusing on the main result: eidetic λH is a space-efficient manifest contract calculus with the same operational behavior as classic λH. More discussion and intermediate results—all in a unified framework for space efficiency—can be found in the technical report on the arXiv.

Contracts: first-order interlopers in a higher-order world

Blog, Papers, Programming LanguagesLeave a comment

Reading Aseem Rastogi, Avik Chaudhuri, and Basil Hosmer‘s POPL 2012 paper The Ins and Outs of Gradual Type Inference, I ran across a quote that could well appear directly in my POPL 2015 paper, Space-Efficient Manifest Contracts:

The key insight is that … we must recursively deconstruct higher-order types down to their first-order parts, solve for those …, and then reconstruct the higher-order parts … . [Emphasis theirs]

Now, they’re deconstructing “flows” in their type inference and I’m deconstructing types themselves. They have to be careful about what’s known in the program and what isn’t, and I have to be careful about blame labels. But in both cases, a proper treatment of errors creates some asymmetries. And in both cases, the solution is to break everything down to the first-order checks, reconstructing a higher-order solution afterwards.

The “make it all first order” approach contrasts with subtyping approaches (like in Well Typed Programs Can’t Be Blamed and Threesomes, with and without blame). I think it’s worth pointing out that as we begin to consider blame, contract composition operators look less and less like meet operations and more like… something entirely different. Should contracts with blame inhabit some kind of skew lattice? Something else?

I highly recommend the Rastogi et al. paper, with one note: when they say kind, I think they mean “type shape” or “type skeleton”—not “kind” in the sense of classifying types and type constructors. Edited to add: also, how often does a type inference paper include a performance evaluation? Just delightful!

Scheduling the discussion order at PC meetings

SoftwareLeave a comment

I recently wrote a bit of code for scheduling the discussion order of PC meetings so as to minimize traffic in and out of the room due to conflicts of interest. Given some information that HotCRP happily generates, the code generates a schedule, which can be further turned into a handout and slides showing the current paper’s conflicts and the two upcoming papers.

If you’re interested in using or contributing, I’ve put the code up at mgree/conflict on github.