research-article

The ruby type checker

Authors:

Brianna M. Ren,

T. Stephen Strickland,

Jeffrey S. FosterAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '13: Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 1565 - 1572

https://doi.org/10.1145/2480362.2480655

Published: 18 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

We present the Ruby Type Checker (rtc), a tool that adds type checking to Ruby, an object-oriented, dynamic scripting language. Rtc is implemented as a Ruby library in which all type checking occurs at run time; thus it checks types later than a purely static system, but earlier than a traditional dynamic type system. Rtc supports type annotations on classes, methods, and objects and rtc provides a rich type language that includes union and intersection types, higherorder (block) types, and parametric polymorphism among other features. Rtc is designed so programmers can control exactly where type checking occurs: type-annotated objects serve as the "roots" of the type checking process, and unannotated objects are not type checked. We have applied rtc to several programs and found it to be easy to use and effective at checking types.

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Cited By

Guo YChen ZChen LXu WLi YZhou YXu B(2024)Generating Python Type Annotations from Type Inference: How Far Are We?ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/365215333:5(1-38)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652153
Souza BPradel MChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)LExecutor: Learning-Guided ExecutionProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616254(1522-1534)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616254
Greenman BDimoulas CFelleisen M(2023)Typed–Untyped Interactions: A Comparative AnalysisACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/357983345:1(1-54)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579833
Show More Cited By

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The ruby type checker

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cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '13: Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

March 2013

2124 pages

ISBN:9781450316569

DOI:10.1145/2480362

Conference Chairs:
Sung Y. Shin
South Dakota State University, United States
,
José Carlos Maldonado
ICMC - University of São Paulo, Brazil

Copyright © 2013 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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SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 18 March 2013

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SAC '13

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SAC '13: SAC '13

March 18 - 22, 2013

Coimbra, Portugal

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SAC '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 255 of 1,063 submissions, 24%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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SAC '25

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The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 31 - April 4, 2025

Catania , Italy

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Cited By

Guo YChen ZChen LXu WLi YZhou YXu B(2024)Generating Python Type Annotations from Type Inference: How Far Are We?ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/365215333:5(1-38)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652153
Souza BPradel MChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)LExecutor: Learning-Guided ExecutionProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616254(1522-1534)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616254
Greenman BDimoulas CFelleisen M(2023)Typed–Untyped Interactions: A Comparative AnalysisACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/357983345:1(1-54)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579833
Jesse KDevanbu PSawant A(2023)Learning to Predict User-Defined TypesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.317894549:4(1508-1522)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2022.3178945
Di Grazia LPradel MRoychoudhury ACadar CKim M(2022)The evolution of type annotations in python: an empirical studyProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3549114(209-220)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3540250.3549114
Peng YGao CLi ZGao BLo DZhang QLyu MDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)Static inference meets deep learningProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510038(2019-2030)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510003.3510038
Pei KGuan JBroughton MChen ZYao SWilliams-King DUmmadisetty VYang JRay BJana SSpinellis DGousios GChechik MDi Penta M(2021)StateFormer: fine-grained type recovery from binaries using generative state modelingProceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3468264.3468607(690-702)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3468264.3468607
Tunnell Wilson PGreenman BPombrio JKrishnamurthi S(2020)The behavior of gradual types: a user studyACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3393673.327694753:8(1-12)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3393673.3276947
Pradel MGousios GLiu JChandra SDevanbu PCohen MZimmermann T(2020)TypeWriter: neural type prediction with search-based validationProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3409715(209-220)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368089.3409715
Vitousek MSiek JChaudhuri AMarr SFumero J(2019)Optimizing and evaluating transient gradual typingProceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages10.1145/3359619.3359742(28-41)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359619.3359742
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