Benjamin Chung
Jan Vitek
ABSTRACT
Gradual typing refers to the notion that programs can be incrementally decorated with type annotations. Languages that support this approach to software development allow for programs being in various states of "typedness" on a scale ranging from entirely untyped to fully statically typed. Points in the middle of this typed-untyped scale create interactions between typed and untyped code, which is where gradual type systems differ. Each gradual type system comes with tradeoffs. Some systems provide strong guarantees at the expense of vastly degraded performance; others do not impact the running time of programs, but they do little to prevent type errors. This paper looks at an intriguing point in the landscape of these systems: the monotonic semantics. The monotonic semantics is designed to reduce the overhead of typed field access through a different enforcement mechanism compared to other gradual type systems. In our previous paper, [1], we described four semantics for gradual typing. This paper uses the framework of that companion paper to present and explore a formulation for the monotonic semantics. In comparison to the others, the monotonic semantics is designed to reduce the overhead of typed field access. We translate a common gradually typed source language to a common statically typed target language according to the monotonic semantics, allowing easy comparison to other gradual type systems in our framework.
- Benjamin Chung, Paley Li, Francesco Zappa Nardelli, and Jan Vitek. 2018. KafKa: Gradual Typing for Objects. In European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP).Google Scholar
- Andre Kuhlenschmidt, Deyaaeldeen Almahallawi, and Jeremy G. Siek. 2018. Efficient Gradual Typing. CoRR abs/1802.06375 (2018). arXiv:1802.06375 http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06375Google Scholar
- Gregor Richards, Ellen Arteca, and Alexi Turcotte. 2017. The VM Already Knew That: Leveraging Compile-time Knowledge to Optimize Gradual Typing. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 1, OOPSLA (2017). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jeremy Siek. 2006. Gradual Typing for Functional Languages. In Scheme and Functional Programming Workshop. http://ecee.colorado.edu/~siek/pubs/pubs/2006/siek06_gradual.pdf.Google Scholar
- Asumu Takikawa, Daniel Feltey, Ben Greenman, Max New, Jan Vitek, and Matthias Felleisen. 2016. Is sound gradual typing dead?. In Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and Matthias Felleisen. 2006. Interlanguage migration: from scripts to programs. In Symposium on Dynamic languages (DLS). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michael Vitousek, Andrew Kent, Jeremy Siek, and Jim Baker. 2014. Design and Evaluation of Gradual Typing for Python. In Symposium on Dynamic languages (DLS). Google ScholarDigital Library
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