Home Turnstile+: Dependent Type Systems as Macros In 2017, a team from Northeastern University released Turnstile, a framework for implementing propositionally typed languages in Racket; cf. naasking's story Type Systems as Macros. The system was really nice because it allowed type systems to be expressed in a manner similar to the way theoretical PL researchers would in a paper, and because it hooked into Racket's clean compiler backend. Now Stephen Chang, one of that team, together with new coauthors Michael Ballantyne, Usamilo Turner and William Bowman, have released a rewrite that they call Turnstile+, together with a POPL article, Dependent Type Systems as Macros. From that article's introduction: Turnstile+ represents a major research leap over its predecessor. Specifically, we solve the major challenges necessary to implement dependent types and their accompanying DSLs and extensions (which Turnstile could not support), while retaining the original abilities of Turnstile. For example, one considerable obstacle was the separation between the macro expansion phase and a program’s runtime phase. Since dependently typed languages may evaluate expressions while type checking, checking dependent types with macros requires new macrology design patterns and abstractions for interleaving expansion, type checking, and evaluation. The following summarizes our key innovations. Turnstile+ demands a radically different API for implementing a language’s types. It must be straightforward yet expressive enough to represent a range of constructs from base types, to binding forms like Π-types, to datatype definition forms for indexed inductive type families.

Turnstile+ includes an API for defining type-level computation, which we dub normalization by macro expansion. A programmer writes a reduction rule using syntax resembling familiar on-paper notation, and Turnstile+ generates a macro definition that performs the reduction during macro expansion. This allows easily implementing modular type-level evaluation.

Turnstile+’s new type API adds a generic type operation interface, enabling modular implementation of features such as error messages, pattern matching, and resugaring. This is particularly important for implementing tools like tactic systems that inspect intermediate type-checking steps and construct partial terms.

Turnstile+’s core type checking infrastructure requires an overhaul, specifically with first-class type environments, in order to accommodate features like dependent binding structures of the shape[x:τ]...,i.e., telescopes [de Bruijn 1991; McBride 2000].

Relatedly, Turnstile+’s inference-rule syntax is extended so that operations over telescopes, or premises with references to telescopes, operate as folds instead of as maps The code is available at https://github.com/stchang/macrotypes. Comment viewing options Flat list - collapsed Flat list - expanded Threaded list - collapsed Threaded list - expanded Date - newest first Date - oldest first Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.