Literature survey on implementation techniques for type systems: Exploring name binding techniques

Names are essential for structuring and reason-ing about programs. However, the implementation of names differs across many programming lan-guages. There is an bundance of choice between various implementation techniques with regards to name-binding techniques. As such, when design-ing a programming language it is not clear which technique one...

Scope Graphs: The Story so Far

Static name binding (i.e., associating references with appropriate declarations) is an essential aspect of programming languages. However, it is usually treated in an unprincipled manner, often leaving a gap between formalization and implementation. The scope graph formalism mitigates these deficiencies by providing a well-defined, first...

Verifying Well-Typedness Preservation of Refactorings using Scope Graphs

The goal of automated refactoring is to reduce maintenance effort. To realize this, programmers need to be able to trust or manually check that refactorings actually preserve behavior. To allow programmers to focus on such checks, automated refactorings should preserve program well-typedness. However, historically automated refactorings in...

Incremental Type-Checking for Free: Using Scope Graphs to Derive Incremental Type-Checkers

Fast analysis response times in IDEs are essential for a good editor experience. Incremental type-checking can provide that in a scalable fashion. However, existing techniques are not reusable between languages. Moreover, mutual and dynamic dependencies preclude traditional approaches to incrementality. This makes finding automatic approaches to...

Composable Type System Specification using Heterogeneous Scope Graphs

Static Analysis is of indispensable value for the robustness of software systems and the efficiency of developers. Moreover, many modern-day software systems are composed of interacting subsystems written in different programming languages. However, in most cases no static validation of these interactions is applied. In this thesis, we identify...

Knowing when to ask: Sound scheduling of name resolution in type checkers derived from declarative specifications

There is a large gap between the specification of type systems and the implementation of their type checkers, which impedes reasoning about the soundness of the type checker with respect to the specification. A vision to close this gap is to automatically obtain type checkers from declarative programming language specifications. This moves...

Incrementalizing Statix: A Modular and Incremental Approach for Type Checking and Name Binding using Scope Graphs

Statix is a language which generates a type checker from a declarative specification. However, Statix is not fast enough for quick feedback in IDEs because it always has to reanalyze all files. In this thesis, we improve the analysis time of Statix by applying the ideas of separate compilation to create a model for incremental analysis. Statix...

Towards language-parametric semantic editor services based on declarative type system specifications

Editor services assist programmers to more effectively write and comprehend code. Implementing editor services correctly is not trivial. This paper focuses on the specification of semantic editor services, those that use the semantic model of a program. The specification of refactorings is a common subject of study, but many other semantic...

A Constraint Language for Static Semantic Analysis Based on Scope Graphs

In previous work, we introduced scope graphs as a formalism for describing program binding structure and performing name resolution in an AST-independent way. In this paper, we show how to use scope graphs to build static semantic analyzers. We use constraints extracted from the AST to specify facts about binding, typing, and initialization. We...

A Constraint Language for Static Semantic Analysis Based on Scope Graphs with Proofs

In previous work, we introduced scope graphs as a formalism for describing program binding structure and performing name resolution in an AST-independent way. In this paper, we show how to use scope graphs to build static semantic analyzers. We use constraints extracted from the AST to specify facts about binding, typing, and initialization. We...

A Theory of Name Resolution with extended Coverage and Proofs

We describe a language-independent theory for name binding and resolution, suitable for programming languages with complex scoping rules including both lexical scoping and modules. We formulate name resolution as a two stage problem. First a language-independent scope graph is constructed using language-specific rules from an abstract syntax...

A Language Designer's Workbench: A One-Stop-Shop for Implementation and Verification of Language Designs

The realization of a language design requires multiple artifacts that redundantly encode the same information. This entails significant effort for language implementors, and often results in late detection of errors in language definitions. In this paper we present a proof-of-concept language designer's workbench that supports generation of IDEs...