POPL 2024
Sun 14 - Sat 20 January 2024 London, United Kingdom
Fri 19 Jan 2024 13:20 - 13:40 at Kelvin Lecture - Types 3 Chair(s): Steven Ramsay

Type inference in the presence of first-class or “impredicative” second-order polymorphism à la System F has been an active research area for several decades, with original works dating back to the end of the 80s. Yet, until now many basic problems remain open, such as how to type check expressions like (𝜆𝑥. (𝑥 123, 𝑥 True)) id reliably. We show that a type inference approach based on multi-bounded polymorphism, a form of implicit polymorphic subtyping with multiple lower and upper bounds, can help us resolve most of these problems in a uniquely simple and regular way. We define F{≤ }, a declarative type system derived from the existing theory of implicit coercions by Cretin and Rémy (LICS 2014), and we introduce SuperF, a novel algorithm to infer polymorphic multi-bounded F{≤ } types while checking user type annotations written in the syntax of System F. We use a recursion-avoiding heuristic to guarantee termination of type inference at the cost of rejecting some valid programs, which thankfully rarely triggers in practice. We show that SuperF is vastly more powerful than all first-class-polymorphic type inference systems proposed so far, significantly advancing the state of the art in type inference for general-purpose programming languages.

Slides with backups (popl24-superf.pdf)1.33MiB

Fri 19 Jan

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13:20 - 14:40
Types 3POPL at Kelvin Lecture
Chair(s): Steven Ramsay University of Bristol
13:20
20m
Talk
When Subtyping Constraints Liberate: A Novel Type Inference Approach for First-Class Polymorphism
POPL
Lionel Parreaux HKUST (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Aleksander Boruch-Gruszecki EPFL, Andong Fan HKUST (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Chun Yin Chau HKUST (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
DOI Pre-print File Attached
13:40
20m
Talk
Parametric Subtyping for Structural Parametric PolymorphismDistinguished PaperRemote
POPL
Henry DeYoung CMU, Andreia Mordido University of Lisbon, Frank Pfenning Carnegie Mellon University, USA, Ankush Das Amazon
14:00
20m
Talk
Unboxed data constructors -- or, how cpp decides a halting problem
POPL
Nicolas Chataing ENS Paris, Stephen Dolan Jane Street, Gabriel Scherer INRIA Saclay, Jeremy Yallop University of Cambridge
14:20
20m
Talk
Polymorphic Type Inference for Dynamic Languages
POPL
Giuseppe Castagna CNRS; Université Paris Cité, Mickaël Laurent Université Paris Cité / IRIF, Kim Nguyễn Université Paris-Saclay
Link to publication DOI