What to Define When You’re Defining Gradual Type Systems

So you want to define a gradual type system, like all the cool kids? My SNAPL 2019 paper imagines three possible motivations:

  1. Expressiveness. You have nothing to lose but your static chains!
  2. Interoperation. Gradual typing seamlessly weaves the dynamic and static worlds into a single fabric.
  3. Typing itself. Static typing offers myriad benefits: enjoy them today!

You don’t have to pick just one. Or maybe you have a different motivation—I’d love to hear it. If you’re motivated by one of these goals but aren’t sure what to do, the paper offers a variety of challenge problems in Section 3.

Now, what do you have to do to define your gradual type system? You have to come up with a type system that has a question mark in it, of course. (You can also write any or dyn or Dynamic or *—whatever works for you.) But what else?

  • A surface language. Since Siek and Taha’s seminal 2006 paper, gradual types have commonly been expressed via elaboration: a source language (with nonexistent or optional or partial type annotations) is translated to a core language that makes all dynamism explicit. What is your source language? Even if you don’t define your source language formally, give an intuition about how programmers will experience it. Can programmers control what’s dynamic and what’s static? Do you ever reject source programs? Which? (GTLC rejects true 5—even in dead code—but different source languages could do different things.) Why is your line the right one to draw?
  • Concrete examples. Ideally drawing from real-world examples, what might be good about gradual types in your context? What new programs do you allow? What problems do you avoid? What guarantees do you gain? Make your example programs good! As Alan Perlis said, “A program without a loop and a structured variable isn’t worth writing”. Examples from the SNAPL paper include: the flatten function, JSON processing, or the “attach-to-the-request” idiom in middleware.
  • Operations. What can we do with base types? Having real operations around will force you to answer hard questions about your source and core languages. How does equality work, i.e., what can be compared and what are the answers? Does your dynamic language reject 5 + "hit"? What about 5 + ((λx.x) "hit")? If you truly have a dynamic type, what operations can you do on it? Which can fail? Is there a way to check at runtime whether casting to a static type will succeed before you commit to such reckless behavior?
  • Control. Include conditionals or some other nontrivial notion of control flow. The first published rules for gradual typing that used a notion of ‘meet’ came in 2012! The way you treat join points in control says a lot about the ergonomics of your system. Church encodings do not cut the mustard.
  • Type semantics. Are your types worth the pixels they’re written on? What do they mean? If I have a value of a given type, what guarantees do I have? You don’t need to give a formal type semantics, but it’s important to know what to expect. If I write a function λx:T. e, what can I actually assume about x in e? If T is int, do I know x is an int, or could it blow up? What about ref int… can reading fail? Writing? What about list int? Does pattern matching on it cause conversions, or possible failure? What about…

The SNAPL 2019 paper argues that there are two ‘lineages’ of gradual typing: one which starts from statically typed languages and relaxes or modifies the type system to include dynamic features, and one which starts from dynamic languages and tries to develop a static type system that can accommodate your ‘preexisting conditions’—legacy code. Whichever lineage you’re working in, each item above is worth carefully considering.

I want to conclude by calling out a paper that more people ought to know about; it does a good job on most of these points. It came out the same year as Alanis Morisette’s acclaimed international debut album, Jagged Little Pill.

(The official ACM version is less complete than the technical report—alas.) They are clear about their surface language (Scheme—with argument lists and call/cc, but not arbitrary set!). They have an entire section of concrete examples, with good demonstrations of how conditionals work with their coercion parameters. They even draw on examples from the literature, citing Mike Fagan’s thesis (which is a goldmine of examples). They don’t give a formal type semantics, but they do explain (with positive and negative examples) how type coercion parameters and polymorphism interact to achieve in their elaborated ML the ad hoc polymorphism necessary to implement their source Scheme.

I also want to highlight this paper because it’s one that I’ve never heard folks actually talk about, though it seems to be cited well enough. I urge anyone who is interested in gradual types to read it. Just like Alanis’s cri de coeur against the shallow world of pop, some things from 1995 are worth revisiting.

Ron Garcia gave helpful feedback on a draft of this post. Thanks, Ron!

Formulog: ML + Datalog + SMT

If you read a description of a static analysis in a paper, what might you find? There’ll be some cute model of a language. Maybe some inference rules describing the analysis itself, but those rules probably rely on a variety of helper functions. These days, the analysis likely involves some logical reasoning: about the terms in the language, the branches conditionals might take, and so on.

What makes a language good for implementing such an analysis? You’d want a variety of features:

  • Algebraic data types to model the language AST.
  • Logic programming for cleanly specifying inference rules.
  • Pure functional code for writing the helper functions.
  • An SMT solver for answering logical queries.

Aaron Bembenek, Steve Chong, and I have developed a design that hits the sweet spot of those four points: given Datalog as a core, you add constructors, pure ML, and a type-safe interface to SMT. If you set things up just right, the system is a powerful and ergonomic way to write static analyses.

Formulog is our prototype implementation of our design; our paper on Formulog and its design was just conditionally accepted to OOPSLA 2020. To give a sense of why I’m excited, let me excerpt from our simple liquid type checker. Weighing in under 400 very short lines, it’s a nice showcase of how expressive Formulog is. (Our paper discusses substantially more complex examples.)

type base =
  | base_bool

type typ = 
  | typ_tvar(tvar)
  | typ_fun(var, typ, typ)
  | typ_forall(tvar, typ)
  | typ_ref(var, base, exp)

and exp = 
  | exp_var(var)
  | exp_bool(bool)
  | exp_op(op)
  | exp_lam(var, typ, exp)
  | exp_tlam(tvar, exp)
  | exp_app(exp, exp)
  | exp_tapp(exp, typ)

ADTs let you define your AST in a straightforward way. Here, bool is our only base type, but we could add more. Let’s look at some of the inference rules:

(* subtyping *)
output sub(ctx, typ, typ)

(* bidirectional typing rules *)
output synth(ctx, exp, typ)
output check(ctx, exp, typ)

(* subtyping between refinement types is implication *)
sub(G, typ_ref(X, B, E1), typ_ref(Y, B, E2)) :-
  wf_ctx(G),
  exp_subst(Y, exp_var(X), E2) = E2prime,
  encode_ctx(G, PhiG),
  encode_exp(E1, Phi1),
  encode_exp(E2prime, Phi2),
  is_valid(`PhiG /\ Phi1 ==> Phi2`).

(* lambda and application synth rules *)
synth(G, exp_lam(X, T1, E), T) :-
  wf_typ(G, T1),
  synth(ctx_var(G, X, T1), E, T2),
  typ_fun(X, T1, T2) = T.

synth(G, exp_app(E1, E2), T) :-
  synth(G, E1, typ_fun(X, T1, T2)),
  check(G, E2, T1),
  typ_subst(X, E2, T2) = T.

(* the only checking rule *)
check(G, E, T) :-
  synth(G, E, Tprime),
  sub(G, Tprime, T).

First, we declare our relations—that is, the (typed) inference rules we’ll be using. We show the most interesting case of subtyping: refinement implication. Several helper relations (wf_ctx, encode_*) and helper functions (exp_subst) patch things together. The typing rules below follow a similar pattern, mixing the synth and check bidirectional typing relations with calls to helper functions like typ_subst.

fun exp_subst(X: var, E : exp, Etgt : exp) : exp =
  match Etgt with
  | exp_var(Y) => if X = Y then E else Etgt
  | exp_bool(_) => Etgt
  | exp_op(_) => Etgt
  | exp_lam(Y, Tlam, Elam) =>
    let Yfresh = 
      fresh_for(Y, X::append(typ_freevars(Tlam), exp_freevars(Elam)))
    in
    let Elamfresh = 
      if Y = Yfresh
      then Elam
      else exp_subst(Y, exp_var(Yfresh), Elam)
    in
    exp_lam(Yfresh,
            typ_subst(X, E, Tlam),
            Elamfresh)
  | exp_tlam(A, Etlam) =>
    exp_tlam(A, exp_subst(X, E, Etlam))
  | exp_app(E1, E2) => 
    exp_app(exp_subst(X, E, E1), exp_subst(X, E, E2))
  | exp_tapp(Etapp, T) => 
    exp_tapp(exp_subst(X, E, Etapp), typ_subst(X, E, T))
  end

Expression substitution might be boring, but it shows the ML fragment well enough. It’s more or less the usual ML, though functions need to have pure interfaces, and we have a few restrictions in place to keep typing simple in our prototype.

There’s lots of fun stuff that doesn’t make it into this example: not only can relations call functions, but functions can examine relations (so long as everything is stratified). Hiding inside fresh_for is a clever approach to name generation that guarantees freshness… but is also deterministic and won’t interfere with parallel execution. The draft paper has more substantial examples.

We’re not the first to combine logic programming and SMT. What makes our design a sweet spot is that it doesn’t let SMT get in the way of Datalog’s straightforward and powerful execution model. Datalog execution is readily parallelizable; the magic sets transformation can turn Datalog’s exhaustive, bottom-up search into a goal-directed one. It’s not news that Datalog can turn these tricks—Yiannis Smaragdakis has been saying it for years!—but integrating Datalog cleanly with ML functions and SMT is new. Check out the draft paper for a detailed related work comparison. While our design is, in the end, not so complicated, getting there was hard.

Relatedly, we have also have an extended abstract at ICLP 2020, detailing some experiments in using incremental solving modes from Formulog. You might worry that Datalog’s BFS (or heuristic) strategy wouldn’t work with an SMT solver’s push/pop (i.e., DFS) assertion stack—but a few implementation tricks and check-sat-assuming indeed provide speedups.