The goal of automatic resource bound analysis is to statically infer symbolic
bounds on the resource consumption of the evaluation of a program. A
longstanding challenge for automatic resource analysis is the inference of
bounds that are functions of complex custom data structures. This article
builds on type-based automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA) to address
this challenge. AARA is based on the potential method of amortized analysis and
reduces bound inference to standard type inference with additional linear
constraint solving, even when deriving non-linear bounds. A key component of
AARA is resource functions that generate the space of possible bounds for
values of a given type while enjoying necessary closure properties.
Existing work on AARA defined such functions for many data structures such as
lists of lists but the question of whether such functions exist for arbitrary
data structures remained open. This work answers this questions positively by
uniformly constructing resource polynomials for algebraic data structures
defined by regular recursive types. These functions are a generalization of all
previously proposed polynomial resource functions and can be seen as a general
notion of polynomials for values of a given recursive type. A resource type
system for FPC, a core language with recursive types, demonstrates how resource
polynomials can be integrated with AARA while preserving all benefits of past
techniques. The article also proposes the use of new techniques useful for
stating the rules of this type system and proving it sound. First, multivariate
potential annotations are stated in terms of free semimodules, substantially
abstracting details of the presentation of annotations and the proofs of their
properties. Second, a logical relation giving semantic meaning to resource
types enables a proof of soundness by a single induction on typing derivations.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures; to be published in LICS'2