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Polymorphic types and effects with Boolean unification

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Jaco van de PolAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 4, Issue OOPSLA

Article No.: 154, Pages 1 - 29

https://doi.org/10.1145/3428222

Published: 13 November 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We present a simple, practical, and expressive type and effect system based on Boolean constraints. The effect system extends the Hindley-Milner type system, supports parametric polymorphism, and preserves principal types modulo Boolean equivalence. We show how to support type inference by extending Algorithm W with Boolean unification based on the successive variable elimination algorithm.

We implement the type and effect system in the Flix programming language. We perform an in-depth evaluation on the impact of Boolean unification on type inference time and end-to-end compilation time. While the computational complexity of Boolean unification is NP-hard, the experimental results demonstrate that it works well in practice. We find that the impact on type inference time is on average a 1.4x slowdown and the overall impact on end-to-end compilation time is a 1.1x slowdown.

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Cited By

Lutze MMadsen M(2024)Associated Effects: Flexible Abstractions for Effectful ProgrammingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36563938:PLDI(394-416)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656393
Madsen Mvan de Pol JHenriksen T(2023)Fast and Efficient Boolean Unification for Hindley-Milner-Style Type and Effect SystemsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228167:OOPSLA2(516-543)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622816
Lutze MMadsen MSchuster PBrachthäuser J(2023)With or Without You: Programming with Effect ExclusionProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36078467:ICFP(448-475)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607846
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Polymorphic types and effects with Boolean unification
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Logic
    1. Type theory

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages Volume 4, Issue OOPSLA

November 2020

3108 pages

EISSN:2475-1421

DOI:10.1145/3436718

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2020 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 November 2020

Published in PACMPL Volume 4, Issue OOPSLA

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Cited By

Lutze MMadsen M(2024)Associated Effects: Flexible Abstractions for Effectful ProgrammingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36563938:PLDI(394-416)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656393
Madsen Mvan de Pol JHenriksen T(2023)Fast and Efficient Boolean Unification for Hindley-Milner-Style Type and Effect SystemsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228167:OOPSLA2(516-543)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622816
Lutze MMadsen MSchuster PBrachthäuser J(2023)With or Without You: Programming with Effect ExclusionProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36078467:ICFP(448-475)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607846
Madsen MScholliers CSinger J(2022)The Principles of the Flix Programming LanguageProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3563835.3567661(112-127)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563835.3567661
Akshay SChakraborty S(2022)Synthesizing Skolem Functions: A View from Theory and PracticeHandbook of Logical Thought in India10.1007/978-81-322-2577-5_51(1187-1222)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2577-5_51
Akshay SChakraborty S(2022)Synthesizing Skolem Functions: A View from Theory and PracticeHandbook of Logical Thought in India10.1007/978-81-322-1812-8_51-1(1-36)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1812-8_51-1
Madsen Mvan de Pol J(2021)Relational nullable types with Boolean unificationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34854875:OOPSLA(1-28)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3485487

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