Space-Efficient Manifest Contracts at POPL 15

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.

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