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Sound and Complete Bidirectional Typechecking for Higher-Rank Polymorphism with Existentials and Indexed Types

or,

"oh shit, the sequel!"
— thoughtpolice

What's this?

This repo contains a work-in-progress implementation of Sound and Complete Bidirectional Typechecking for Higher-Rank Polymorphism with Existentials and Indexed Types, which I will refer to by the slightly more radio-friendly "Sound and Complete" hereafter. Once this is done, I plan to use it as the base for a practically useful Haskell-like language with row types, typeclasses, higher-rank polymorphism, GADTs, and composable pattern-matching. (That's the plan, anyway.)

This paper is a sequel to Complete and Easy Bidirectional Typechecking for Higher-Rank Polymorphism ("Complete and Easy" hereafter).

Help wanted!

This is (to my knowledge) the first implementation of Sound and Complete ever. I'm a PLT enthusiast who actually happens to know very little in the way of real typechecker / compiler engineering. If working with / learning from / mentoring me on the (as far as I know) third non-dependently typed language with GADTs sounds interesting, let's talk.

PRs and new issues welcome!

Contact me

I'm @mrkgrnao on Twitter and chow dot soham at Google's mail.

Features

Sound and Complete is significantly more complex (by my inexpert evaluation) than Complete and Easy. However, it extends the latter with a number of highly desirable features.

Indexed types / GADTs

Indexed types are familiar to Haskell and OCaml programmers as generalized algebraic data types or GADTs. The paper specifies a primitive sized-vector type with a builtin Nat kind as an example of how GADTs are handled in its system. This is equivalent to the familiar "old saw", but eliminating the need for type-promotion (via the DataKinds language extension for Haskell):

data Nat = Zero | Succ Nat

data Vec :: Nat -> Type -> Type where
  Nil :: Vec 'Zero a
  Cons :: a -> Vec n a -> Vec ('Succ n) a

A specification for pattern-matching

This is the real confounding factor in adding GADTs to a simple ML or Haskell 98-alike.

The hard part about implementing GADTs is pattern matching.

-- @paf31 on purescript/purescript#1448

Pattern-matching on a term of an indexed type reveals new information to the typechecker, which must be taken into account while checking the body of the match. Indeed:

data Foo a where
  Bar :: Int    -> Foo Int
  Baz :: String -> Foo String
  
modifyFoo :: Foo a -> Foo a
modifyFoo (Bar i) = 
  -- the compiler knows that i is of type Int here!
  2 * i
modifyFoo (Baz i) =
  -- the compiler knows that i is a String in the body of the pattern match,
  -- as before
  i ++ " modified!"

Needless to say, this would never work with a simple data Foo a = Bar a | Baz a type.

A specification for exhaustivity (match coverage) checking

This is somewhat related to the previous point and also happens to be a difficult thing to do (Phil refers to this problem in the issue referenced there) in the presence of GADTs. This may seem easy to do for simple types like Foo, but more involved indexed types with constructors like

data HOAS a where
  WrapFun :: (a -> b) -> HOAS a -> HOAS b

quickly make this highly nontrivial. Sound and Complete gives a complete specification for algorithmically checking match coverage.

References, resources, bibliographical things

Complete and Easy

  • Alexis King has written a clear implementation of Complete and Easy implementation in Haskell. She is also the principal developer of Hackett, a Haskell-like language built on the Racket platform that uses a type-system based on Complete and Easy.

  • Olle Fredriksson also has an implementation of Complete and Easy (also in Haskell). More interestingly for us, his Sixten language has many interesting features and is in a similar space type-system-wise (even though it is based on a different core).

  • The PureScript language has a type-system inspired by Complete and Easy.

General language-implementation resources

  • Typing Haskell in Haskell, a small typechecker for most of Haskell 98. A much easier-to-read Markdown version can be found here, courtesy of Chris Done.

Tentative roadmap (read TODO list)

  • finish implementing Sound and Complete
  • write a good test-suite
  • write a frontend
  • write a proof-of-concept interpreter
  • add HM-like type inference, find if this can be done without breaking any properties
  • investigate typeclasses
  • LLVM backend
  • don't think too far

License

GPL-3 for now.