Correct by Construction Language Implementations

Arjen Rouvoet


Date: Thu, October 14, 2021
Time: 15:00
Room: Senaatszaal, Auditorium
Note: This is a PhD defense. The candidate's talk starts at 14.30.


The PhD thesis is about the design of meta-languages for the specification and implementation of typed programming languages, such that the implementation is formally proven type-correct. For language front-ends—i.e., type checkers—the thesis contributions a method for automatically obtaining sound type checkers from declarative type-system specifications. Language back-ends—i.e., interpreters and compilers—are developed in the dependently typed meta-language Agda in an intrinsically typed style so that the implementation also encompasses a type-safety proof. The contributions of the thesis there is to make it to scale these ideas from simply typed functional languages, to languages with references a la ML or concurrency and session-typed cross-thread communication, and a low-level language with labels and jumps. This is made possible by developing, among other things, an abstract, shallowly embedded separation logic in Agda, as a basis for functional abstractions (e.g., monads) that encapsulate both computational work and proof work.

Reference

Arjen Rouvoet. Correct by Construction Language Implementations. PhD thesis, TU Delft. October 2021.

Advisor: Eelco Visser

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