First-Class Effect Reflection for Effect-Guided Programming

By: Yuheng Long, Yu David Liu, and Hridesh Rajan

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel type-and-effect calculus, first-class effects, where the computational effect of an expression can be programmatically reflected, passed around as values, and analyzed at run time. A broad range of designs "hard-coded" in existing effect-guided analyses — from thread scheduling, version-consistent software updating, to data zeroing — can be naturally supported through the programming abstractions. The core technical development is a type system with a number of features, including a hybrid type system that integrates static and dynamic effect analyses, a refinement type system to verify application-specific effect management properties, a double-bounded type system that computes both over-approximation of effects and their under-approximation. We introduce and establish a notion of soundness called trace consistency, defined in terms of how the effect and trace correspond. The property sheds foundational insight on "good" first-class effect programming.

ACM Reference

Long, Y. et al. 2016. First-Class Effect Reflection for Effect-Guided Programming. OOPSLA’16: The ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (Nov. 2016).

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{long2016first,
  author = {Yuheng Long and Yu David Liu and Hridesh Rajan},
  title = {First-Class Effect Reflection for Effect-Guided Programming},
  booktitle = {OOPSLA'16: The ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications},
  series = {OOPSLA'16},
  location = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
  month = {November},
  year = {2016},
  entrysubtype = {conference},
  abstract = {
    This paper introduces a novel type-and-effect calculus, first-class effects,
    where the computational effect of an expression can be programmatically
    reflected, passed around as values, and analyzed at run time. A broad range of
    designs "hard-coded" in existing effect-guided analyses — from thread
    scheduling, version-consistent software updating, to data zeroing — can be
    naturally supported through the programming abstractions. The core technical
    development is a type system with a number of features, including a hybrid
    type system that integrates static and dynamic effect analyses, a refinement
    type system to verify application-specific effect management properties, a
    double-bounded type system that computes both over-approximation of effects
    and their under-approximation. We introduce and establish a notion of
    soundness called trace consistency, defined in terms of how the effect and
    trace correspond. The property sheds foundational insight on "good"
    first-class effect programming.
  }
}