Stephanie Weirich

Levy’s call-by-push-value (CBPV) is a language that subsumes both call-by-name and call-by-value lambda calculi by syntactically distinguishing values from computations and explicitly specifying execution order. This low-level handling of computation suspension and resumption makes CBPV suitable as a compiler intermediate representation (IR), while its substitution evaluation semantics affords compositional reasoning about programs. In particular, βη-equivalences in CBPV have been used to justify compiler optimizations in low-level IRs. However, these equivalences do not validate commuting conversions , which are key transformations in compiler passes such as A-normalization. Such transformations syntactically rearrange computations without affecting evaluation order, and can reveal new opportunities for inlining. In this work, we identify the commuting conversions of CBPV, define a commuting conversion normal form (CCNF) for CBPV, present a single-pass transformation into CCNF based on A-normalization, and prove that well-typed, translated programs evaluate to the same result. To avoid the usual code duplication issues that also arise with A-normal form, we adapt the explicit join point constructs by Maurer et al. Our results are all mechanized in Lean 4.

Strictness analysis is critical to efficient implementation of languages with non-strict evaluation, mitigating much of the performance overhead of laziness. However, reasoning about strictness at the source level can be challenging and unintuitive. We propose a new definition of strictness that refines the traditional one by describing variable usage more precisely. We lay type-theoretic foundations for this definition in both call-by-name and call-by-push-value settings, drawing inspiration from the literature on type systems tracking effects and coeffects. We prove via a logical relation that the strictness attributes computed by our type systems accurately describe the use of variables at runtime, and we offer a strictness-annotation-preserving translation from the call-by-name system to the call-by-push-value one. All our results are mechanized in Rocq.

In a dependent type theory with β-equivalence as its equational theory, the confluence of untyped reduction and termination immediately give us a proof of the decidability of type conversion, where the decision procedure for convertibility simply checks the equality of the β-normal forms of its inputs. This technique is not available in the presence of surjective pairing (i.e. the η-law for pairs) because βη-reduction is not confluent. In this work, we show that by adopting established syntactic techniques, we can resolve the issue with confluence caused by surjective pairing, and recover a confluence-based proof of decidability of type conversion. Compared to existing proof developments, which rely on semantic tools such as Kripke-style logical relations, our proof modularly composes a minimal semantic proof of untyped normalization and a syntactic proof of decidability. This modularity enables us to explore algorithmic conversion through syntactic methods without modifying the minimal semantic proof. We have fully mechanized our results using the Rocq theorem prover.

A hierarchy of type universes is a rudimentary ingredient in the type theories of many proof assistants to prevent the logical inconsistency resulting from combining dependent functions and the type-in-type axiom. In this work, we argue that a universe hierarchy is not the only option for universes in type theory. Taking inspiration from Leivant’s Stratified System F, we introduce Stratified Type Theory (), where rather than stratifying universes by levels, we stratify typing judgements and restrict the domain of dependent functions to strictly lower levels. Even with type-in-type, this restriction suffices to enforce consistency. In , we consider a number of extensions beyond just stratified dependent functions. First, the subsystem employs McBride’s crude-but-effective stratification (also known as displacement) as a simple form of level polymorphism where global definitions with concrete levels can be displaced uniformly to any higher level. Second, to recover some expressivity lost due to the restriction on dependent function domains, the full includes a separate nondependent function type with a floating domain whose level matches that of the overall function type. Finally, we have implemented a prototype type checker for extended with datatypes and inference for level and displacement annotations, along with a small core library. We have proven to be consistent and to be type safe, but consistency of the full remains an open problem, largely due to the interaction between floating functions and cumulativity of judgements. Nevertheless, we believe to be consistent, and as evidence have verified the ill-typedness of some well-known type-theoretic paradoxes using our implementation.

The Dependent Calculus of Indistinguishability (DCOI) uses dependency tracking to identify irrelevant arguments and uses indistinguishability during type conversion to enable proof irrelevance, supporting run-time and compile-time irrelevance with the same uniform mechanism. DCOI also internalizes reasoning about indistinguishability through the use of a propositional equality type indexed by an observer level. As DCOI is a pure type system, prior work establishes only its syntactic type safety, justifying its use as the basis for a programming language with dependent types. However, it was not clear whether any instance of this system would be suitable for use as a type theory for theorem proving. Here, we identify a suitable instance DCOI ω , which has an infinite predicative universe hierarchy. We show that DCOI ω is logically consistent, normalizing, and that type conversion is decidable. We have mechanized all results using the Coq proof assistant.

Effect and coeffect tracking integrate many types of compile-time analysis, such as cost, liveness, or dataflow, directly into a language’s type system. In this paper, we investigate the addition of effect and coeffect tracking to the type system of call-by-push-value (CBPV), a computational model useful in compilation for its isolation of effects and for its ability to cleanly express both call-by-name and call-by-value computations. Our main result is effect-and-coeffect soundness , which asserts that the type system accurately bounds the effects that the program may trigger during execution and accurately tracks the demands that the program may make on its environment. This result holds for two different dynamic semantics: a generic one that can be adapted for different coeffects and one that is adapted for reasoning about resource usage. In particular, the second semantics discards the evaluation of unused values and pure computations while ensuring that effectful computations are always evaluated, even if their results are not required. Our results have been mechanized using the Coq proof assistant.

Lazy evaluation is a powerful tool that enables better compositionality and potentially better performance in functional programming, but it is challenging to analyze its computation cost. Existing works either require manually annotating sharing, or rely on separation logic to reason about heaps of mutable cells. In this paper, we propose a bidirectional demand semantics that allows for extrinsic reasoning about the computation cost of lazy programs without relying on special program logics. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we apply the demand semantics to a variety of case studies including insertion sort, selection sort, Okasaki’s banker’s queue, and the implicit queue. We formally prove that the banker’s queue and the implicit queue are both amortized and persistent using the Rocq Prover (formerly known as Coq). We also propose the reverse physicist’s method, a novel variant of the classical physicist’s method, which enables mechanized, modular and compositional reasoning about amortization and persistence with the demand semantics.

In type systems with dependency tracking, programmers can assign an ordered set of levels to computations and prevent information flow from high-level computations to the low-level ones. The key notion in such systems is indistinguishability : a definition of program equivalence that takes into account the parts of the program that an observer may depend on. In this paper, we investigate the use of dependency tracking in the context of dependently-typed languages. We present the Dependent Calculus of Indistinguishability (DCOI), a system that adopts indistinguishability as the definition of equality used by the type checker. DCOI also internalizes that relation as an observer-indexed propositional equality type, so that programmers may reason about indistinguishability within the language. Our design generalizes and extends prior systems that combine dependency tracking with dependent types and is the first to support conversion and propositional equality at arbitrary observer levels. We have proven type soundness and noninterference theorems for DCOI and have developed a prototype implementation of its type checker.