Subtyping on Nested Polymorphic Session Types 3 Types [38]
Subtyping on Nested Polymorphic Session Types Ankush Das1, Henry DeYoung1, Andreia Mordido2, and Frank Pfenning1 1 Carnegie Mellon University, USA 2 LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciˆencias, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal Abstract. The importance of subtyping to enable a wider range of well- typed programs is undeniable. However, the interaction between subtyp- ing, recursion, and polymorphism is not completely understood yet. In this work, we explore subtyping in a system of nested, recursive, and polymorphic types with a coinductive interpretation, and we prove that this problem is undecidable. Our results will be broadly applicable, but to keep our study grounded in a concrete setting, we work with an extension of session types with explicit polymorphism, parametric type construc- tors, and nested types. We prove that subtyping is undecidable even for the fragment with only internal choices and nested unary recursive type constructors. Despite this negative result, we present a subtyping algo- rithm for our system and prove its soundness. We minimize the impact of the inescapable incompleteness by enabling the programmer to seed the algorithm with subtyping declarations (that are validated by the al- gorithm). We have implemented the proposed algorithm in Rast and it showed to be efficient in various example programs. 1 Introduction Subtyping is a standard feature in modern programming languages, whether functional, imperative, or object-oriented. The two principal approaches to un- derstanding the meaning of subtyping is via coercions or as subsets. Either way, subtyping allows more programs as well-typed, programs can be more concise, and types can express more informative properties of programs. When it comes to the interaction between advanced features of type systems, specifically recursive and polymorphic types, there are still some gaps in our arXiv:2103.15193v1 [cs.PL] 28 Mar 2021 understanding of subtyping.
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