A quick look at impredicativity
- Alejandro Serrano ,
- Jurriaan Hage ,
- Simon Peyton Jones ,
- Dimitrios Vytiniotis
International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'20) |
Published by ACM | Organized by ACM
Type inference for parametric polymorphism is wildly successful, but has always suffered from an embarrassing flaw: polymorphic types are themselves not first class. We present Quick Look, a practical, implemented, and deployable design for impredicative type inference. To demonstrate our claims, we have modified GHC, a production-quality Haskell compiler, to support impredicativity. The changes required are modest, localised, and are fully compatible with GHC’s myriad other type system extensions.
Here is a video of Simon giving a talk on the ideas in the paper (opens in new tab)