Implicits provide a powerful mechanism for term-based inference, where "obvious" arguments can be omitted and inferred by the type checker. This can greatly reduce the programmer's burden and improve the clarity of expression. As such, many languages support a form of implicits in practice, such as type classes in Haskell or Lean, or implicits in Scala. Unfortunately, many of these systems have become increasingly complex and often require significant implementation effort. In this paper we take a fresh look at the design space with an arguably simpler approach based on two orthogonal features: _syntactic implicit parameters_ and _static overloading_. Each of these features is limited in scope and has a straightforward implementation. Taken together though, they are surprisingly expressive and we believe they can cover many of the common usage scenarios of implicits in practice. We formalize our system and provide various examples, and prove our elaboration is coherent. We also give an inference algorithm and show it is sound and complete. Our system is fully implemented in the Koka language, and we describe our experience with these features at scale, and discuss further extensions.

Abstract The tail recursion modulo cons transformation can rewrite functions that are not quite tail-recursive into a tail-recursive form that can be executed efficiently. In this article, we generalize tail recursion modulo cons (TRMc) to modulo context (TRMC) and calculate a general TRMC algorithm from its specification. We can instantiate our general algorithm by providing an implementation of application and composition on abstract contexts and showing that our context laws hold. We provide some known instantiations of TRMC, namely modulo evaluation contexts (CPS), and associative operations , and further instantiations not so commonly associated with TRMC, such as defunctionalized evaluation contexts, monoids , semirings , exponents , and fields . We study the modulo cons instantiation in particular and prove that an instantiation using Minamide’s hole calculus is sound. We also calculate a second instantiation in terms of the Perceus heap semantics to precisely reason about the soundness of in-place update. While all previous approaches to TRMc fail in the presence of nonlinear control (e.g., induced by call/cc, shift/reset, or algebraic effect handlers), we can elegantly extend the heap semantics to a hybrid approach which dynamically adapts to nonlinear control flow. We have a full implementation of hybrid TRMc in the Koka language, and our benchmark shows the TRMc transformed functions are always as fast or faster than using manual alternatives.

At the heart of the Damas-Hindley-Milner (HM) type system lies the abstraction rule which derives a function type for a lambda expression. In this rule, the type of the parameter can be "guessed", and can be any type that fits the derivation. The beauty of the HM system is that there always exists a most general type that encompasses all possible derivations – Algorithm W is used to infer these most general types in practice. Unfortunately, this property is also the bane of the HM type rules. Many languages extend HM typing with additional features which often require complex side conditions to the type rules to maintain principal types. For example, various type systems for impredicative type inference, like HMF, FreezeML, or Boxy types, require let-bindings to always assign most general types. Such a restriction is difficult to specify as a logical deduction rule though, as it ranges over all possible derivations. Despite these complications, the actual implementations of various type inference algorithms are usually straightforward extensions of algorithm W , and from an implementation perspective, much of the complexity of various type system extensions, like boxes or polymorphic weights, is in some sense artificial. In this article we rephrase the HM type rules as type inference under a prefix , called HMQ. HMQ is sound and complete with respect to the HM type rules, but always derives principal types that correspond to the types inferred by algorithm W. The HMQ type rules are close to the clarity of the declarative HM type rules, but also specific enough to "read off" an inference algorithm, and can form an excellent basis to describe type system extensions in practice. We show in particular how to describe the FreezeML and HMF systems in terms of inference under a prefix, and how we no longer require complex side conditions. We also show a novel formalization of static overloading in HMQ as implemented in Koka language.

In strict languages, laziness is typically modeled with explicit thunks that defer a computation until needed and memoize the result. Such thunks are implemented using a closure. Implementing lazy data structures using thunks thus has several disadvantages: closures cannot be printed or inspected during debugging; allocating closures requires additional memory, sometimes leading to poor performance; reasoning about the performance of such lazy data structures is notoriously subtle. These complications prevent wider adoption of lazy data structures, even in settings where they should shine. In this paper, we introduce lazy constructors as a simple first-order alternative to lazy thunks. Lazy constructors enable the thunks of a lazy data structure to be defunctionalized, yielding implementations of lazy data structures that are not only significantly faster but can easily be inspected for debugging.

Algorithms on restructuring binary search trees are typically presented in imperative pseudocode. Understandably so, as their performance relies on in-place execution, rather than the repeated allocation of fresh nodes in memory. Unfortunately, these imperative algorithms are notoriously difficult to verify as their loop invariants must relate the unfinished tree fragments being rebalanced. This paper presents several novel functional algorithms for accessing and inserting elements in a restructuring binary search tree that are as fast as their imperative counterparts; yet the correctness of these functional algorithms is established using a simple inductive argument. For each data structure, move-to-root, splay, and zip trees, this paper describes both a bottom-up algorithm using zippers and a top-down algorithm using a novel first-class constructor context primitive. The functional and imperative algorithms are equivalent: we mechanise the proofs establishing this in the Coq proof assistant using the Iris framework. This yields a first fully verified implementation of well known algorithms on binary search trees with performance on par with the fastest implementations in C.

The tail-recursion modulo cons transformation can rewrite functions that are not quite tail-recursive into a tail-recursive form that can be executed efficiently. In this article we generalize tail recursion modulo cons (TRMc) to modulo contexts (TRMC), and calculate a general TRMC algorithm from its specification. We can instantiate our general algorithm by providing an implementation of application and composition on abstract contexts, and showing that our context laws_ hold. We provide some known instantiations of TRMC, namely modulo evaluation contexts (CPS), and associative operations , and further instantiantions not so commonly associated with TRMC, such as defunctionalized evaluation contexts, monoids , semirings , exponents , and cons products . We study the modulo cons instantiation in particular and prove that an instantiation using Minamide’s hole calculus is sound. We also calculate a second instantiation in terms of the Perceus heap semantics to precisely reason about the soundness of in-place update. While all previous approaches to TRMc fail in the presence of non-linear control (for example induced by call/cc, shift/reset or algebraic effect handlers), we can elegantly extend the heap semantics to a hybrid approach which dynamically adapts to non-linear control flow. We have a full implementation of hybrid TRMc in the Koka language and our benchmark shows the TRMc transformed functions are always as fast or faster than using manual alternatives.

As functional programmers we always face a dilemma: should we write purely functional code, or sacrifice purity for efficiency and resort to in-place updates? This paper identifies precisely when we can have the best of both worlds: a wide class of purely functional programs can be executed safely using in-place updates without requiring allocation, provided their arguments are not shared elsewhere. We describe a linear _fully in-place_ (FIP) calculus where we prove that we can always execute such functions in a way that requires no (de)allocation and uses constant stack space. Of course, such a calculus is only relevant if we can express interesting algorithms; we provide numerous examples of in-place functions on datastructures such as splay trees or finger trees, together with in-place versions of merge sort and quick sort. We also show how we can generically derive a map function over _any_ polynomial data type that is fully in-place. Finally, we have implemented the rules of the FIP calculus in the Koka language. Using the Perceus reference counting garbage collection, this implementation dynamically executes FIP functions in-place whenever possible.

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a low-level portable code format offering near native performance. It is intended as a compilation target for a wide variety of source languages. However, Wasm provides no direct support for non-local control flow features such as async/await, generators/iterators, lightweight threads, first-class continuations, etc. This means that compilers for source languages with such features must ceremoniously transform whole source programs in order to target Wasm. We present WasmFX an extension to Wasm which provides a universal target for non-local control features via effect handlers, enabling compilers to translate such features directly into Wasm. Our extension is minimal and only adds three main instructions for creating, suspending, and resuming continuations. Moreover, our primitive instructions are type-safe providing typed continuations which are well-aligned with the design principles of Wasm whose stacks are typed. We present a formal specification of WasmFX and show that the extension is sound. We have implemented WasmFX as an extension to the Wasm reference interpreter and also built a prototype WasmFX extension for Wasmtime, a production-grade Wasm engine, piggybacking on Wasmtime's existing fibers API. The preliminary performance results for our prototype are encouraging, and we outline future plans to realise a native implementation.

The recently introduced _Perceus_ algorithm can automatically insert reference count instructions such that the resulting (cycle-free) program is _garbage free_: objects are freed at the very moment they can no longer be referenced. An important extension is reuse analysis. This optimization pairs objects of known size with fresh allocations of the same size and tries to reuse the object in-place at runtime if it happens to be unique. Unfortunately, current implementations of reuse analysis are fragile with respect to small program transformations, or can cause an arbitrary increase in the peak heap usage. We present a novel _drop-guided_ reuse algorithm that is simpler and more robust than previous approaches. Moreover, we generalize the linear resource calculus to precisely characterize garbage-free and frame-limited evaluations. On each function call, a frame-limited evaluation may hold on to memory longer if the size is bounded by a constant factor. Using this framework we show that our drop-guided reuse _is_ frame-limited and find that an implementation of our new reuse approach in Koka can provide significant speedups.

Algebraic effects and handlers are a promising technique for incorporating composable computational effects into functional programming languages. Effect handlers enable concisely programming with different effects, but they do not offer a convenient way to program with different instances of the same effect. As a solution to this inconvenience, previous studies have introduced _named effect handlers_, which allow the programmer to distinguish among different effect instances. However, existing formalizations of named handlers are both involved and restrictive, as they employ non-standard mechanisms to prevent the escaping of handler names. In this paper, we propose a simple and flexible design of named handlers. Specifically, we treat handler names as first-class values, and prevent their escaping while staying within the ordinary λ-calculus. Such a design is enabled by combining named handlers with _scoped effects_, a novel variation of effects that maintain a scope via rank-2 polymorphism. We formalize two combinations of named handlers and scoped effects, and implement them in the Koka programming language. We also present practical applications of named handlers, including a neural network and a unification algorithm.

We introduce Perceus, an algorithm for precise reference counting with reuse and specialization. Starting from a functional core language with explicit control-flow, Perceus emits precise reference counting instructions such that (cycle-free) programs are _garbage free_, where only live references are retained. This enables further optimizations, like reuse analysis that allows for guaranteed in-place updates at runtime. This in turn enables a novel programming paradigm that we call _functional but in-place_ (FBIP). Much like tail-call optimization enables writing loops with regular function calls, reuse analysis enables writing in-place mutating algorithms in a purely functional way. We give a novel formalization of reference counting in a linear resource calculus, and prove that Perceus is sound and garbage free. We show evidence that Perceus, as implemented in Koka, has good performance and is competitive with other state-of-the-art memory collectors.

This paper studies compilation techniques for algebraic effect handlers. In particular, we present a sequence of refinements of algebraic effects, going via multi-prompt delimited control, _generalized evidence passing_, yield bubbling, and finally a monadic translation into plain lambda calculus which can be compiled efficiently to many target platforms. Along the way we explore various interesting points in the design space. We provide two implementations of our techniques, one as a library in Haskell, and one as a C backend for the Koka programming language. We show that our techniques are effective, by comparing against three other best-in-class implementations of effect handlers: multi-core OCaml, the _Ev.Eff_ Haskell library, and the libhandler C library. We hope this work can serve as a basis for future designs and implementations of algebraic effects.

Algebraic effect handlers are a powerful way to incorporate effects in a programming language. Sometimes perhaps even _too_ powerful. In this article we define a restriction of general effect handlers with _scoped resumptions_. We argue one can still express all important effects, while improving reasoning about effect handlers. Using the newly gained guarantees, we define a sound and coherent evidence translation for effect handlers, which directly passes the handlers as evidence to each operation. We prove full soundness and coherence of the translation into plain lambda calculus. The evidence in turn enables efficient implementations of effect operations; in particular, we show we can execute tail-resumptive operations _in place_ (without needing to capture the evaluation context), and how we can replace the runtime search for a handler by indexing with a constant offset.

JavaScript code running in the Node.js runtime is a major platform for developers building cloud, mobile, or IoT applications. A fundamental concept in Node.js programming is the use of asynchronous callbacks and event loops to provide highly responsive applications. While conceptually simple, this programming model contains numerous subtleties and behaviors that are defined implicitly by the current Node.js implementation. This paper presents the first comprehensive formalization of the Node.js asynchronous execution model and defines a high-level notion of async-contexts to formalize fundamental relationships between asynchronous executions in an application. These formalizations provide a foundation for the construction of static or dynamic program analysis tools, support the exploration of alternative Node.js event loop implementations, and provide a high-level conceptual framework for reasoning about relationships between the execution of asynchronous callbacks in a Node.js application.

Complex situations and systems can be studied by using adequate models in simulation. An important aspect of models and the simulation software is the ability to use a wide range of possible input parameters. The simulation described in this paper is based on agile manufacturing by using transport robots and cheap reconfigurable production platforms, called equiplets. This setup makes agile manufacturing of different products in parallel possible.The simulation showed the maximum load of such a production environment as well as a proof of concept for the distributed approach for transport used.

Algebraic effect handlers, introduced by Plotkin and Power in 2002,

Madoko [6-8] is a novel authoring system for writing complex documents. It is especially well suited for complex academic or industrial documents, like scientific articles, reference manuals, or math-heavy presentations. One particular important aspect of Madoko is to write a document in high-level Markdown [5] with a focus on semantic content. From this document specification we can generate both high-quality PDF output (via LATEX) but also generate highquality HTML that can re-scale and re-flow dynamically. Styling is done through standard CSS attributes and can be done orthogonal to the content.

short-paper Share on Madoko: Scholarly Documents for the Web Author: Daan Leijen Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USAView Profile Authors Info & Claims DocEng '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on Document EngineeringSeptember 2015 Pages 129–132https://doi.org/10.1145/2682571.2797097Published:08 September 2015Publication History 5citation150DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations5Total Downloads150Last 12 Months7Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

In the age of cloud-connected mobile devices, users want responsive apps that read and write shared data everywhere, at all times, even if network connections are slow or unavailable. The solution is to replicate data and propagate updates asynchronously. Unfortunately, such mechanisms are notoriously difficult to understand, explain, and implement. To address these challenges, we present GSP (global sequence protocol), an operational model for replicated shared data. GSP is simple and abstract enough to serve as a mental reference model, and offers fine control over the asynchronous update propagation (update transactions, strong synchronization). It abstracts the data model and thus applies both to simple key-value stores, and complex structured data. We then show how to implement GSP robustly on a client-server architecture (masking silent client crashes, server crash-recovery failures, and arbitrary network failures) and efficiently (transmitting and storing minimal information by reducing update sequences).

Software tools researchers can accelerate their ability to learn by exposing tools to users via web technologies, allowing them to observe and test the interactions between humans and tools. At Microsoft Research, we have developed a web service (http://www.rise4fun.com/) for such a purpose that is available for community use.

This article presents an extension to the work of Launchbury and Peyton-Jones on the ST monad. Using a novel model for concurrency, called concurrent revisions [3,5], we show how we can use concurrency together with imperative mutable variables, while still being able to safely convert such computations (in the Rev monad) into pure values again.

Many useful programming constructions can be expressed as monads. Examples include probabilistic modeling, functional reactive programming, parsing, and information flow tracking, not to mention effectful functionality like state and I/O. In this paper, we present a type-based rewriting algorithm to make programming with arbitrary monads as easy as using ML's built-in support for state and I/O. Developers write programs using monadic values of type m τ as if they were of type τ, and our algorithm inserts the necessary binds, units, and monad-to-monad morphisms so that the program type checks. Our algorithm, based on Jones' qualified types, produces principal types. But principal types are sometimes problematic: the program's semantics could depend on the choice of instantiation when more than one instantiation is valid. In such situations we are able to simplify the types to remove any ambiguity but without adversely affecting typability; thus we can accept strictly more programs. Moreover, we have proved that this simplification is efficient (linear in the number of constraints) and coherent: while our algorithm induces a particular rewriting, all related rewritings will have the same semantics. We have implemented our approach for a core functional language and applied it successfully to simple examples from the domains listed above, which are used as illustrations throughout the paper.

Parallel or incremental versions of an algorithm can significantly outperform their counterparts, but are often difficult to develop. Programming models that provide appropriate abstractions to decompose data and tasks can simplify parallelization. We show in this work that the same abstractions can enable both parallel and incremental execution. We present a novel algorithm for parallel self-adjusting computation. This algorithm extends a deterministic parallel programming model (concurrent revisions) with support for recording and repeating computations. On record, we construct a dynamic dependence graph of the parallel computation. On repeat, we reexecute only parts whose dependencies have changed.

Building applications that are responsive and can exploit parallel hardware while remaining simple to write, understand, test, and maintain, poses an important challenge for developers. In particular, it is often desirable to enable various tasks to read or modify shared data concurrently without requiring complicated locking schemes that may throttle concurrency and introduce bugs.

The Task Parallel Library (TPL) is a library for .NET that makes it easy to take advantage of potential parallelism in a program. The library relies heavily on generics and delegate expressions to provide custom control structures expressing structured parallelism such as map-reduce in user programs. The library implementation is built around the notion of a task as a finite CPU-bound computation. To capture the ubiquitous apply-to-all pattern the library also introduces the novel concept of a replicable task. Tasks and replicable tasks are assigned to threads using work stealing techniques, but unlike traditional implementations based on the THE protocol, the library uses a novel data structure called a 'duplicating queue'. A surprising feature of duplicating queues is that they have sequentially inconsistent behavior on architectures with weak memory models, but capture this non-determinism in a benign way by sometimes duplicating elements. TPL ships as part of the Microsoft Parallel Extensions for the .NET framework 4.0, and forms the foundation of Parallel LINQ queries (however, note that the productized TPL library may differ in significant ways from the basic design described in this article).

We present HML, a type inference system that supports full first-class polymorphism where few annotations are needed: only function parameters with a polymorphic type need to be annotated. HML is a simplification of MLF where only flexibly quantified types are used. This makes the types easier to work with from a programmers perspective, and simplifies the implementation of the type inference algorithm. Still, HML retains much of the expressiveness of MLF, it is robust with respect to small program transformations, and has a simple specification of the type rules with an effective type inference algorithm that infers principal types. A small reference implementation with many examples is available at: http://research.microsoft.com/users/daan/pubs.html.

HMF is a conservative extension of Hindley-Milner type inference with first-class polymorphism. In contrast to other proposals, HML uses regular System F types and has a simple type inference algorithm that is just a small extension of the usual Damas-Milner algorithm W. Given the relative simplicity and expressive power, we feel that HMF can be an attractive type system in practice. There is a reference implementation of the type system available online together with a technical report containing proofs (Leijen 2007a,b).

The MLF type system by Le Botlan and Rémy is a natural extension of Hindley-Milner type inference that supports full first-class polymorphism, where types can be of higher-rank and impredicatively instantiated. Even though MLF is theoretically very attractive, it has not seen widespread adoption. We believe that this partly because it is unclear how the rich language of MLF types relate to standard System F types. In this article we give the first type directed translation of MLF terms to System F terms. Based on insight gained from this translation, we also define "Rigid MLF" (MLF=), a restriction of MLF where all bound values have a System F type. The expressiveness of MLF= is the same as that of boxy types, but MLF= needs fewer annotations and we give a detailed comparison between them.

MLF is a type system that extends a functional language with impredicative rank-n polymorphism. Type inference remains possible and only in some clearly defined situations, a local type annotation is required. Qualified types are a general concept that can accommodate a wide range of type systems extension, for example, type classes in Haskell. We show how the theory of qualified types can be used seamlessly with the higher-ranked impredicative polymorphism of MLF, and give a solution to the non-trivial problem of evidence translation in the presence of impredicative datatypes.

wxHaskell is a graphical user interface (GUI) library for Haskell that is built on wxWidgets: a free industrial strength GUI library for C++ that has been ported to all major platforms, including Windows, Gtk, and MacOS X. In contrast with many other libraries, wxWidgets retains the native look-and-feel of each particular platform. We show how distinctive features of Haskell, like parametric polymorphism, higher-order functions, and first-class computations, can be used to present a concise and elegant monadic interface for portable GUI programs.

Helium is a user-friendly compiler designed especially for learning the functional programming language Haskell. The quality of the error messages has been the main concern both in the choice of the language features and in the implementation of the compiler. Helium implements almost full Haskell, where the most notable difference is the absence of type classes. Our goal is to let students learn functional programming more quickly and with more fun. The compiler has been successfully employed in two introductory programming courses at Utrecht University.

The increasing popularity of component-based programming tools offer a big opportunity to designers of advanced programming languages, such as Haskell. If we can package our programs as COM objects, then it is easy to integrate them into applications written in other languages. In earlier work we described a preliminary integration of Haskell with Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM), focusing on how Haskell can create and invoke COM objects. This paper develops that work, concentrating on the mechanisms that support externally-callable Haskell functions, and the encapsulation of a Haskell program as a COM object. 1 Introduction "Component-based programming" is all the rage. It has come to mean an approach to software construction in which a program is an assembly software components, perhaps written in different languages, glued together by some common substrate [16]. The most widely used substrates are Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM), and the Common Object Request Broke...

H/Direct is a foreign-language interface for the purely functional language Haskell. Rather than rely on host-language type signatures, H/Direct compiles Interface Definition Language (IDL) to Haskell stub code that marshals data across the interface. This approach allows Haskell to call both C and COM, and allows a Haskell component to be wrapped in a C or COM interface. IDL is a complex language and language mappings for IDL are usually described informally. In contrast, we provide a relatively formal and precise definition of the mapping between Haskell and IDL.

The expressiveness of higher-order typed languages such as Haskell or ML makes them an attractive medium in which to write software components. Hitherto, however, their use has been limited by the all-or-nothing problem: it is hard to write just part of an application in these languages. Component-based programming using a binary standard such as Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) offers a solution to this dilemma, by specifying a language-independent interface between components. This paper reports about our experience with exploiting this opportunity in the purely functional language Haskell. We describe a design for integrating COM components into Haskell programs, and we demonstrate why someone might want to script their COM components in this way.