Transitioning from structural to nominal code with efficient gradual typing

Mühlböck F, Tate R. 2021. Transitioning from structural to nominal code with efficient gradual typing. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. 5, 127.

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Journal Article | Published | English
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Abstract
Gradual typing is a principled means for mixing typed and untyped code. But typed and untyped code often exhibit different programming patterns. There is already substantial research investigating gradually giving types to code exhibiting typical untyped patterns, and some research investigating gradually removing types from code exhibiting typical typed patterns. This paper investigates how to extend these established gradual-typing concepts to give formal guarantees not only about how to change types as code evolves but also about how to change such programming patterns as well. In particular, we explore mixing untyped "structural" code with typed "nominal" code in an object-oriented language. But whereas previous work only allowed "nominal" objects to be treated as "structural" objects, we also allow "structural" objects to dynamically acquire certain nominal types, namely interfaces. We present a calculus that supports such "cross-paradigm" code migration and interoperation in a manner satisfying both the static and dynamic gradual guarantees, and demonstrate that the calculus can be implemented efficiently.
Publishing Year
Date Published
2021-10-15
Journal Title
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Acknowledgement
We thank the reviewers for their valuable suggestions towards improving the paper. We also thank Mae Milano and Adrian Sampson, as well as the members of the Programming Languages Discussion Group at Cornell University and of the Programming Research Laboratory at Northeastern University, for their helpful feedback on preliminary findings of this work. This material is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through grant CCF-1350182 and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through grant Z211-N23 (Wittgenstein~Award). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or the FWF.
Volume
5
Article Number
127
Conference
OOPSLA: Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications
Conference Location
Chicago, IL, United States
Conference Date
2021-10-17 – 2021-10-23
eISSN
IST-REx-ID

Cite this

Mühlböck F, Tate R. Transitioning from structural to nominal code with efficient gradual typing. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. 2021;5. doi:10.1145/3485504
Mühlböck, F., & Tate, R. (2021). Transitioning from structural to nominal code with efficient gradual typing. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. Chicago, IL, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3485504
Mühlböck, Fabian, and Ross Tate. “Transitioning from Structural to Nominal Code with Efficient Gradual Typing.” Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3485504.
F. Mühlböck and R. Tate, “Transitioning from structural to nominal code with efficient gradual typing,” Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, vol. 5. Association for Computing Machinery, 2021.
Mühlböck F, Tate R. 2021. Transitioning from structural to nominal code with efficient gradual typing. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. 5, 127.
Mühlböck, Fabian, and Ross Tate. “Transitioning from Structural to Nominal Code with Efficient Gradual Typing.” Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, vol. 5, 127, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, doi:10.1145/3485504.
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