Type systems provide specifications and enable reasoning about the programs. Among other benefits, type systems provide guarantees of the absence of certain (ill-typed) program behaviors. Refinement types further enrich the expressiveness of type systems by allowing a predicate alongside the type. The crucial divide by zero and null pointer errors are safely eliminated with refinement types. Interestingly, Correctness-by-Construction (CbC) also provides a way to set specifications for the programs. The specifications are provided for the smaller modules. Larger programs are built by composing the functionally correct smaller modules. Therefore, CbC naturally results in verified and correct programs following the program specifications. In this short paper, we highlight that CbC meets refinement types in a sense that both approaches provide specifications for program correctness and larger programs are built by composing the functionally correct smaller modules.
Subtyping is a concept frequently encountered in many programming languages and calculi. Various forms of subtyping exist for different type system features, including intersection types, union types or bounded quantification. Normally these features are designed independently of each other, without exploiting obvious similarities (or dualities) between features.
This paper proposes a novel methodology for designing subtyping relations that exploits duality between features. At the core of our methodology is a generalization of subtyping relations, which we call Duotyping. Duotyping is parameterized by the mode of the relation. One of these modes is the usual subtyping, while another mode is supertyping (the dual of subtyping). Using the mode it is possible to generalize the usual rules of subtyping to account not only for the intended behaviour of one particular language construct, but also of its dual. Duotyping brings multiple benefits, including: shorter specifications and implementations, dual features that come essentially for free, as well as new proof techniques for various properties of subtyping. To evaluate a design based on Duotyping against traditional designs, we formalized various calculi with common OOP features (including union types, intersection types and bounded quantification) in Coq in both styles. Our results show that the metatheory when using Duotyping does not come at a significant cost: the metatheory with Duotyping has similar complexity and size compared to the metatheory for traditional designs. However, we discover new features as duals to well-known features. Furthermore, we also show that Duotyping can significantly simplify transitivity proofs for many of the calculi studied by us.
This artifact contains the Coq formalization associated with the paper The Duality of Subtyping submitted in ECOOP 2020. This document explains how to run the Coq formalization. Artifact can either be compiled in the pre-built docker image with all the dependencies installed or it could be built from the scratch. Sections 1-7 explain the basic information about the artifact. Section A explains how to get the docker image for the artifact. Section B explains the prerequisites and the steps to run coq files from scratch. Section C explains coq files briefly. Section D shows the correspondence between important lemmas discussed in paper and their respective Coq formalization. The term MonoTyping used in artifact corresponds to the standard subtyping systems.