Abstract
Erlang is a concurrent functional programming language developed by Ericsson, well suited for implementing distributed systems. Although Erlang is dynamically typed, the Dialyzer static analysis tool can be used to extract implicit type information from the programs, both for documentation purposes and for finding errors that will definitively arise at program execution. Dialyzer is based on the notion of success types, that correspond to safe over-approximations for the semantics of expressions. Erlang also supports user given function specifications (or just specs), that are contracts providing more information about the semantics of functions. Function specs are useful not only as documentation, but also can be employed by Dialyzer to improve the precision of the analysis. Even though specs can have a polymorphic shape, in practice Dialyzer is not able to exploit all their potential. One reason for that is that extending the notion of success types to a polymorphic setting is not trivial, and several interpretations are possible. In this work we propose a precise formulation for a novel interpretation of function specs as polymorphic success types, and a program transformation that allows us to apply this new interpretation on the call sites of functions with a declared spec. This results in a significant improvement in the number of definite errors that Dialyzer is able to detect.
Work partially supported by the Spanish MINECO project CAVI-ART (TIN2013-44742-C4-3-R), Madrid regional project N-GREENS Software-CM (S2013/ICE-2731) and UCM-Santander grants GR3/14-910502, GR3/14-910398.
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Notes
- 1.
Written in actual Erlang as none(), any(), but we omit those () for types.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Kostis Sagonas and Stavros Aronis, for many fruitful discussions about Dialyzer and success types, that have been fundamental for developing the intuitions about the meaning of polymorphic success types that is proposed in this paper.
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López-Fraguas, F.J., Montenegro, M., Rodríguez-Hortalá, J. (2016). Polymorphic Types in Erlang Function Specifications. In: Kiselyov, O., King, A. (eds) Functional and Logic Programming. FLOPS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9613. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29604-3_12
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