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KafKa: Gradual Typing for Objects

Authors Benjamin Chung, Paley Li, Francesco Zappa Nardelli, Jan Vitek

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LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.12.pdf
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Author Details

Benjamin Chung
  • Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
Paley Li
  • Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
Francesco Zappa Nardelli
  • INRIA, Paris, France
Jan Vitek
  • Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Funding

This work funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 695412), the NSF (award 1544542) and (award 1518844) as well as ONR (award 503353).

Cite As Get BibTex

Benjamin Chung, Paley Li, Francesco Zappa Nardelli, and Jan Vitek. KafKa: Gradual Typing for Objects. In 32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 109, pp. 12:1-12:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.12

Abstract

A wide range of gradual type systems have been proposed, providing many languages with the ability to mix typed and untyped code. However, hiding under language details, these gradual type systems embody fundamentally different ideas of what it means to be well-typed. In this paper, we show that four of the most common gradual type systems provide distinct guarantees, and we give a formal framework for comparing gradual type systems for object-oriented languages. First, we show that the different gradual type systems are practically distinguishable via a three-part litmus test. We present a formal framework for defining and comparing gradual type systems. Within this framework, different gradual type systems become translations between a common source and target language, allowing for direct comparison of semantics and guarantees.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Semantics
Keywords
  • Gradual typing
  • object-orientation
  • language design
  • type systems

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Supplementary Materials

References

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