Pragmatic Gradual Polymorphism with References

Abstract

Gradualizing System F has been widely discussed. A big challenge is to preserve relational parametricity and/or the gradual guarantee. Most past work has focused on the preservation of parametricity, but often without the gradual guarantee. A few recent works satisfy both properties by giving up System F syntax, or with some restrictions and the introduction of sophisticated mechanisms in the dynamic semantics.While parametricity is important for polymorphic languages, most mainstream languages typically do not satisfy it, for a variety of different reasons. In this paper, we explore the design space of polymorphic languages that satisfy the gradual guarantee, but do not preserve parametricity. When parametricity is not a goal, the design of polymorphic gradual languages can be considerably simplified. Moreover, it becomes easy to add features that are of practical importance, such as mutable references. We present a new gradually typed polymorphic calculus, called $$\lambda ^{G}_{gpr}$$ λ gpr G , with mutable references and with an easy proof of the gradual guarantee. In addition, compared to other gradual polymorphism work, $$\lambda ^{G}_{gpr}$$ λ gpr G is defined using a Type-Directed Operational Semantics (TDOS), which allows the dynamic semantics to be defined directly instead of elaborating to a target cast language. $$\lambda ^{G}_{gpr}$$ λ gpr G and all the proofs in this paper are formalized in Coq.