A theory of gradual effect systems

Felipe Bañados Schwerter, Ronald Garcia, Éric Tanter
2014 Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming - ICFP '14  
Effect systems have the potential to help software developers, but their practical adoption has been very limited. We conjecture that this limited adoption is due in part to the difficulty of transitioning from a system where effects are implicit and unrestricted to a system with a static effect discipline, which must settle for conservative checking in order to be decidable. To address this hindrance, we develop a theory of gradual effect checking, which makes it possible to incrementally
more » ... ate and statically check effects, while still rejecting statically inconsistent programs. We extend the generic type-and-effect framework of Marino and Millstein with a notion of unknown effects, which turns out to be significantly more subtle than unknown types in traditional gradual typing. We appeal to abstract interpretation to develop and validate the concepts of gradual effect checking. We also demonstrate how an effect system formulated in Marino and Millstein's framework can be automatically extended to support gradual checking.
doi:10.1145/2628136.2628149 dblp:conf/icfp/SchwerterGT14 fatcat:wcbunjwaezhgrnbu6ppw6beovq