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Mixed Messages: Measuring Conformance and Non-Interference in TypeScript

Authors Jack Williams, J. Garrett Morris, Philip Wadler, Jakub Zalewski

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Jack Williams
J. Garrett Morris
Philip Wadler
Jakub Zalewski

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Jack Williams, J. Garrett Morris, Philip Wadler, and Jakub Zalewski. Mixed Messages: Measuring Conformance and Non-Interference in TypeScript. In 31st European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 74, pp. 28:1-28:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2017) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2017.28

Abstract

TypeScript participates in the recent trend among programming
languages to support gradual typing. The DefinitelyTyped Repository
for TypeScript supplies type definitions for over 2000 popular
JavaScript libraries. However, there is no guarantee that
implementations conform to their corresponding declarations.

We present a practical evaluation of gradual typing for TypeScript.
We have developed a tool for use with TypeScript, based on the
polymorphic blame calculus, for monitoring JavaScript libraries and
TypeScript clients against the TypeScript definition. We apply our
tool, TypeScript TPD, to those libraries in the DefinitelyTyped
Repository which had adequate test code to use. Of the 122 libraries
we checked, 62 had cases where either the library or its tests
failed to conform to the declaration.

Gradual typing should satisfy non-interference. Monitoring a program
should never change its behaviour, except to raise a type error
should a value not conform to its declared type. However, our
experience also suggests serious technical concerns with the use of
the JavaScript proxy mechanism for enforcing contracts. Of the 122
libraries we checked, 22 had cases where the library or its tests
violated non-interference.

Subject Classification

Keywords
  • Gradual Typing
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Proxies

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Supplementary Materials

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