KafKa: Gradual Typing for Objects

A wide range of gradual type systems have been proposed, providing many languages with the ability to mix typed and untyped code. However, hiding under language details, these gradual type systems embody fundamentally different ideas of what it means to be well-typed. In this paper, we show that four of the most common gradual type systems provide distinct guarantees, and we give a formal framework for comparing gradual type systems for object-oriented languages. First, we show that the different gradual type systems are practically distinguishable via a three-part litmus test. We present a formal framework for defining and comparing gradual type systems. Within this framework, different gradual type systems become translations between a common source and target language, allowing for direct comparison of semantics and guarantees

KafKa: Gradual Typing for Objects (Artifact)

A wide range of gradual type systems have been proposed, providing many languages with the ability to mix typed and untyped code. However, hiding under language details, these gradual type systems have fundamentally different ideas of what it means to be typed. In this paper, we show that four of the most common gradual type systems provide distinct guarantees, and we give a formal framework for comparing gradual type systems for object-oriented languages. First, we show that the different gradual type systems are practically distinguishable via a three-part litmus test. Then, we present a formal framework for defining and comparing gradual type systems. Within this framework, different gradual type systems become translations between a common source and target language, allowing for direct comparison of semantics and guarantees

Transitioning from structural to nominal code with efficient gradual typing

Gradual typing is a principled means for mixing typed and untyped code. But typed and untyped code often exhibit different programming patterns. There is already substantial research investigating gradually giving types to code exhibiting typical untyped patterns, and some research investigating gradually removing types from code exhibiting typical typed patterns. This paper investigates how to extend these established gradual-typing concepts to give formal guarantees not only about how to change types as code evolves but also about how to change such programming patterns as well. In particular, we explore mixing untyped "structural" code with typed "nominal" code in an object-oriented language. But whereas previous work only allowed "nominal" objects to be treated as "structural" objects, we also allow "structural" objects to dynamically acquire certain nominal types, namely interfaces. We present a calculus that supports such "cross-paradigm" code migration and interoperation in a manner satisfying both the static and dynamic gradual guarantees, and demonstrate that the calculus can be implemented efficiently

Combining behavioural types with security analysis

Today's software systems are highly distributed and interconnected, and they increasingly rely on communication to achieve their goals; due to their societal importance, security and trustworthiness are crucial aspects for the correctness of these systems. Behavioural types, which extend data types by describing also the structured behaviour of programs, are a widely studied approach to the enforcement of correctness properties in communicating systems. This paper offers a unified overview of proposals based on behavioural types which are aimed at the analysis of security properties