Practical Optional Types for Clojure

DOI10.1007/978-3-662-49498-1_4zbMATH Open1335.68025arXiv1812.03571OpenAlexW2183621552MaRDI QIDQ2802470FDOQ2802470

Authors: Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant, Rowan Davies, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt 

Publication date: 26 April 2016

Published in: Programming Languages and Systems (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Typed Clojure is an optional type system for Clojure, a dynamic language in the Lisp family that targets the JVM. Typed Clojure enables Clojure programmers to gain greater confidence in the correctness of their code via static type checking while remaining in the Clojure world, and has acquired significant adoption in the Clojure community. Typed Clojure repurposes Typed Racket's occurrence typing, an approach to statically reasoning about predicate tests, and also includes several new type system features to handle existing Clojure idioms. In this paper, we describe Typed Clojure and present these type system extensions, focusing on three features widely used in Clojure. First, multimethods provide extensible operations, and their Clojure semantics turns out to have a surprising synergy with the underlying occurrence typing framework. Second, Java interoperability is central to Clojure's mission but introduces challenges such as ubiquitous null; Typed Clojure handles Java interoperability while ensuring the absence of null-pointer exceptions in typed programs. Third, Clojure programmers idiomatically use immutable dictionaries for data structures; Typed Clojure handles this with multiple forms of heterogeneous dictionary types. We provide a formal model of the Typed Clojure type system incorporating these and other features, with a proof of soundness. Additionally, Typed Clojure is now in use by numerous corporations and developers working with Clojure, and we present a quantitative analysis on the use of type system features in two substantial code bases.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.03571

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Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Theory of programming languages (68N15) Mathematical aspects of software engineering (specification, verification, metrics, requirements, etc.) (68N30)

Cites Work

• Operations on records
• Modular statically typed multimethods
• The design and implementation of Typed Scheme
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Logical types for untyped languages
• Practical Variable-Arity Polymorphism

Cited In (1)

• Static blame for gradual typing

Uses Software

• Scala
• Cecil
• TypeScript
• GitHub

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