The merge operator is a powerful construct in programming languages, enabling flexible composition of various components such as functions, records, or classes. Unfortunately, its application often leads to ambiguity and non-determinism, especially when dealing with overlapping types. To prevent ambiguity, approaches such as disjoint intersection types have been proposed. However, disjointness imposes strict constraints to ensure determinism, at the cost of limiting expressiveness, particularly for function overloading. This paper introduces a novel concept called type apartness, which relaxes the strict disjointness constraints, while maintaining type safety and determinism. Type apartness allows some overlap for overloaded functions as long as the calling contexts of those functions can be used to disambiguate upcasts in function calls. By incorporating the notion of guarded subtyping to prevent ambiguity when upcasting, our approach is the first to support function overloading, return type overloading, extensible records, and nested composition in a single calculus while preserving determinism. We formalize our calculi and proofs using Coq and prove their type soundness and determinism. Additionally, we demonstrate how type normalization and type difference provide more convenience and help resolve conflicts, enhancing the flexibility and expressiveness of the merge operator.

Inheritance is a key concept in many programming languages. Dynamically typed languages, such as JavaScript, often support powerful forms of dynamic inheritance. However, dynamic inheritance poses significant challenges for static typing. Most statically typed languages only provide static inheritance to achieve type safety at the cost of flexibility. This article presents a compiler for the CP language, which is a statically typed language that supports dynamic inheritance via a merge operator and also has an expressive form of parametric polymorphism. The merge operator enables a form of multiple inheritance and first-class classes, as well as virtual classes and family polymorphism. With these features, CP allows the development of highly modular and loosely coupled components. However, the efficient compilation of CP code is non-trivial, especially if separate compilation is desired. In particular, subtyping in CP is coercive for type safety, which poses significant challenges in obtaining an efficient compilation scheme. We show how CP is compilable to languages supporting extensible records or similar data structures, where record labels are generated from types for efficient lookup on merges. The main ideas of the compilation scheme are formalized in Coq and proven to be type-safe. The concrete implementation of the CP compiler targets JavaScript, where records are modeled as JavaScript objects. We conduct an empirical evaluation with various benchmarks and evaluate the impact of several CP-specific optimizations. With our optimizations, CP can be orders of magnitude faster than with a naive compilation scheme for merges, obtaining performance on par with class-based JavaScript programs.

The typed merge operator offers the promise of a compositional style of statically-typed programming in which solutions to the expression problem arise naturally. This approach, dubbed compositional programming , has recently been demonstrated by Zhang et al. Unfortunately, the merge operator is an unwieldy beast. Merging values from overlapping types may be ambiguous, so disjointness relations have been introduced to rule out undesired nondeterminism and obtain a well-behaved semantics. Past type systems using a disjoint merge operator rely on intersection types, but extending such systems to include union types or overloaded functions is problematic: naively adding either reintroduces ambiguity. In a nutshell: the elimination forms of unions and overloaded functions require values to be distinguishable by case analysis, but the merge operator can create exotic values that violate that requirement. This paper presents F ⋈ , a core language that demonstrates how unions, intersections, and overloading can all coexist with a tame merge operator. The key is an underlying design principle that states that any two inhabited types can support either the deterministic merging of their values, or the ability to distinguish their values, but never both. To realize this invariant, we decompose previously studied notions of disjointness into two new, dual relations that permit the operation that best suits each pair of types. This duality respects the polarization of the type structure, yielding an expressive language that we prove to be both type safe and deterministic.

In programming languages with records, objects, or traits, it is common to have operators that allow dropping, updating or renaming some components. These operators are useful for programmers to explicitly deal with conflicts and override or update some components. While such operators have been studied for record types, little work has been done to generalize and study their theory for other types. This paper shows that, given subtyping and disjointness relations, we can specify and derive algorithmic implementations for a general type difference operator that works for other types, including function types, record types and intersection types. When defined in this way, the type difference algebra has many desired properties that are expected from a subtraction operator. Together with a generic merge operator, using type difference we can generalize many operations on records formalized in the literature. To illustrate the usefulness of type difference we create an intermediate calculus with a rich set of operators on expressions of arbitrary type, and demonstrate applications of these operators in CP , a prototype language for Compositional Programming . The semantics of the calculus is given by elaborating into a calculus with disjoint intersection types and a merge operator. We have implemented type difference and all the operators in the CP language. Moreover, all the calculi and related proofs are mechanically formalized in the Coq theorem prover.

The recently proposed CP language adopts Compositional Programming: a new modular programming style that solves challenging problems such as the Expression Problem. CP is implemented on top of a polymorphic core language with disjoint intersection types called Fi+. The semantics of Fi+ employs an elaboration to a target language and relies on a sophisticated proof technique to prove the coherence of the elaboration. Unfortunately, the proof technique is technically challenging and hard to scale to many common features, including recursion or impredicative polymorphism. Thus, the original formulation of Fi+ does not support the two later features, which creates a gap between theory and practice, since CP fundamentally relies on them. This paper presents a new formulation of Fi+ based on a type-directed operational semantics (TDOS). The TDOS approach was recently proposed to model the semantics of languages with disjoint intersection types (but without polymorphism). Our work shows that the TDOS approach can be extended to languages with disjoint polymorphism and model the full Fi+ calculus. Unlike the elaboration semantics, which gives the semantics to Fi+ indirectly via a target language, the TDOS approach gives a semantics to Fi+ directly. With a TDOS, there is no need for a coherence proof. Instead, we can simply prove that the semantics is deterministic. The proof of determinism only uses simple reasoning techniques, such as straightforward induction, and is able to handle problematic features such as recursion and impredicative polymorphism. This removes the gap between theory and practice and validates the original proofs of correctness for CP. We formalized the TDOS variant of the Fi+ calculus and all its proofs in the Coq proof assistant.

Abstract Calculi with disjoint intersection types support a symmetric merge operator with subtyping. The merge operator generalizes record concatenation to any type, enabling expressive forms of object composition, and simple solutions to hard modularity problems. Unfortunately, recent calculi with disjoint intersection types and the merge operator lack a (direct) operational semantics with expected properties such as determinism and subject reduction , and only account for terminating programs . This paper proposes a type-directed operational semantics (TDOS) for calculi with intersection types and a merge operator. We study two variants of calculi in the literature. The first calculus, called λ i , is a variant of a calculus presented by Oliveira et al. (2016) and closely related to another calculus by Dunfield (2014). Although Dunfield proposes a direct small-step semantics for her calculus, her semantics lacks both determinism and subject reduction. Using our TDOS, we obtain a direct semantics for λ i that has both properties. The second calculus, called λ i + , employs the well-known subtyping relation of Barendregt, Coppo and Dezani-Ciancaglini (BCD). Therefore, λ i + extends the more basic subtyping relation of λ i , and also adds support for record types and nested composition (which enables recursive composition of merged components). To fully obtain determinism, both λ i and λ i + employ a disjointness restriction proposed in the original λ i calculus. As an added benefit the TDOS approach deals with recursion in a straightforward way, unlike previous calculi with disjoint intersection types where recursion is problematic. We relate the static and dynamic semantics of λ i to the original version of the calculus and the calculus by Dunfield. Furthermore, for λ i + , we show a novel formulation of BCD subtyping, which is algorithmic, has a very simple proof of transitivity and allows for the modular addition of distributivity rules (i.e. without affecting other rules of subtyping). All results have been fully formalized in the Coq theorem prover.

Subtyping with intersection and union types is nowadays common in many programming languages. From the perspective of logic, the subtyping problem is essentially the problem of determining logical entailment : does a logical statement follow from another one? Unfortunately, algorithms for deciding subtyping and logical entailment with intersections, unions and various distributivity laws can be highly non-trivial. This functional pearl presents a novel algorithmic formulation for subtyping (and logical entailment) in the presence of various distributivity rules between intersections, unions and implications (i.e. function types). Unlike many existing algorithms which first normalize types and then apply a subtyping algorithm on the normalized types, our new subtyping algorithm works directly on source types. Our algorithm is based on two recent ideas: a generalization of subtyping based on the duality of language constructs called duotyping ; and splittable types , which characterize types that decompose into two simpler types. We show that our algorithm is sound, complete and decidable with respect to a declarative formulation of subtyping based on the minimal relevant logic B + . Moreover, it leads to a simple and compact implementation in under 50 lines of functional code.

Calculi with disjoint intersection types and a merge operator provide general mechanisms that can subsume various other features. Such calculi can also encode highly dynamic forms of object composition, which capture common programming patterns in dynamically typed languages (such as JavaScript) in a fully statically typed manner. Unfortunately, unlike many other foundational calculi (such as System F, System F_{< :} or Featherweight Java), recent calculi with the merge operator lack a (direct) operational semantics with standard and expected properties such as determinism and subject-reduction. Furthermore the metatheory for such calculi can only account for terminating programs, which is a significant restriction in practice. This paper proposes a type-directed operational semantics (TDOS) for λ_i^{:}: a calculus with intersection types and a merge operator. The calculus is inspired by two closely related calculi by Dunfield (2014) and Oliveira et al. (2016). Although Dunfield proposes a direct small-step semantics for her calculus, her semantics lacks both determinism and subject-reduction. Using our TDOS we obtain a direct semantics for λ_i^{:} that has both properties. To fully obtain determinism, the λ_i^{:} calculus employs a disjointness restriction proposed in Oliveira et al.’s λ_i calculus. As an added benefit the TDOS approach deals with recursion in a straightforward way, unlike λ_i and subsequent calculi where recursion is problematic. To further relate λ_i^{:} to the calculi by Dunfield and Oliveira et al. we show two results. Firstly, the semantics of λ_i^{:} is sound with respect to Dunfield’s small-step semantics. Secondly, we show that the type system of λ_i^{:} is complete with respect to the λ_i type system. All results have been fully formalized in the Coq theorem prover.