Article

A type-preserving closure conversion in haskell

Authors:

Louis-Julien Guillemette,

Stefan MonnierAuthors Info & Claims

Haskell '07: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell workshop

Pages 83 - 92

https://doi.org/10.1145/1291201.1291212

Published: 30 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

The use of typed intermediate languages can significantly increase the reliability of a compiler. By type-checking the code produced at each transformation stage, one can identify bugs in the compiler that would otherwise be much harder to find. Also it guarantees that any property that was enforced by the source-level type-system is holds also or the generated code. Recently, several people have tried to push this effort a bit further by verifying formally that the compiler indeed preserves typing. This is usually done with proof assistants or experimental languages.

Instead, we decided to use Haskell (with GHC's extensions), to see how far we can go with a more mainstream system, supported by robust compilers and plentiful libraries. This article presents one part of our type preserving compiler, namely the closure conversion and its associated hoisting phase, where we use GADTs to let Haskell's type checker verify the we obey the object language's typing rules and that we correctly preserve types from one phase to the other.

This should be both a good showcase as well as a good stress test for GADTs, so we also discuss our experience, as well as some trade-offs in the choice of representation, namely between higher-order abstract syntax (HOAS) and a first order representation (i.e. de Bruijn indices) and justify our choice of a de Bruijn representation. We incidentally present a type preserving conversion from HOAS (used in earlier phases of the compiler[6]) to a de Bruijn representation.

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Cited By

Bernardy JPouillard N(2013)Names for freeACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2578854.250378048:12(13-24)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2578854.2503780
Bernardy JPouillard NShan C(2013)Names for freeProceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Haskell10.1145/2503778.2503780(13-24)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2503778.2503780
Cave APientka BField JHicks M(2012)Programming with binders and indexed data-typesProceedings of the 39th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages10.1145/2103656.2103705(413-424)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2103656.2103705
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A type-preserving closure conversion in haskell
1. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program reasoning
      1. Program verification

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cover image ACM Conferences

Haskell '07: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell workshop

September 2007

126 pages

ISBN:9781595936745

DOI:10.1145/1291201

Program Chair:
Gabriele Keller
University of New South Wales, Australia

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 30 September 2007

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ICFP07

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ICFP07: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 30, 2007

Freiburg, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 57 of 143 submissions, 40%

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Cited By

Bernardy JPouillard N(2013)Names for freeACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2578854.250378048:12(13-24)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2578854.2503780
Bernardy JPouillard NShan C(2013)Names for freeProceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Haskell10.1145/2503778.2503780(13-24)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2503778.2503780
Cave APientka BField JHicks M(2012)Programming with binders and indexed data-typesProceedings of the 39th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages10.1145/2103656.2103705(413-424)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2103656.2103705
Cave APientka B(2012)Programming with binders and indexed data-typesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2103621.210370547:1(413-424)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2103621.2103705
Atkey RLindley SYallop JWeirich S(2009)Unembedding domain-specific languagesProceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Haskell10.1145/1596638.1596644(37-48)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1596638.1596644
Guillemette LMonnier SHook JThiemann P(2008)A type-preserving compiler in HaskellProceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming10.1145/1411204.1411218(75-86)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1411204.1411218
Guillemette LMonnier S(2008)A type-preserving compiler in HaskellACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1411203.141121843:9(75-86)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1411203.1411218

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