24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 5: should-not-typecheck: making Haskell sort of dynamically typed with deferred type errors

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 5

(Reddit discussion)

Have you ever been frustrated when using a statically typed language because there’s a type error somewhere in your code base but you want to run your program anyway, either because you don’t care about that remote type error that has nothing to do with what you’re working on, or because you want to step through your code and debug what the type error really is? I certainly have.

Also, have you ever wanted to write a unit test to verify that your typed code disallows code you want to disallow, but you are frustrated because how do you write code in a typed language that says, “This code (that you won’t typecheck) won’t typecheck” and passes the typechecker and runs?

Welcome to the land of GHC’s “deferred type errors”, a feature that has been part of GHC since version 7.6.1 in 2013. Since this was not covered in Ollie’s 2014 series “24 Days of GHC Extensions”, I decided to bring it up here, and in the context of a cute package, should-not-typecheck that hooks up with HSpec to make assertions that something won’t typecheck.

Installation

Since LTS does not know about this obscure package, Stack helpfully tells us exactly what to add to our stack.yaml to bring it in:

extra-deps: - should-not-typecheck- 2.0 . 1

Let’s write some tests

The full documentation of should-not-typecheck is right there on its Hackage page.

First, we need to enable the GHC option -fdefer-type-errors in the test module, with a directive:

{-# OPTIONS_GHC -fdefer-type-errors #-}

Our first test

import ShouldNotTypecheckExample import Test.Hspec ( Spec , hspec, describe, it , shouldBe , shouldThrow, anyException ) import Test.ShouldNotTypecheck (shouldNotTypecheck) spec :: Spec spec = describe "should-not-typecheck" $ do it "should not allow mapping negation over a list of strings" $ do shouldNotTypecheck (map not [ "hello" , "world" ])

That’s self-explanatory. We can’t do a Boolean negation on a string. Haskell is not a “truthy”-based language, but a truth-based language.

Some puzzling code

Now let’s look at the ShouldNotTypecheckExample module:

{-# OPTIONS_GHC -fdefer-type-errors #-} module ShouldNotTypecheckExample (thisWorks, thisFails) where thisWorks :: String thisWorks = fst ( "hello" , [ "world" / True , "!" ]) thisFails :: String thisFails = snd ( "hello" , [ "world" / True , "!" ])

Pause for a moment, and think of what should happen when thisWorks and thisFails are used, and in what way, and why. In both cases, we have a tuple and are returning the first element or the second element of the tuple. The second element is a list that is clearly ill-typed, because it contains something that is nonsensical (division of a string by a boolean).

The role of laziness

To understand what happens in the following tests, you need to understand how laziness works in Haskell. The word “lazy” has come to be used for many different ideas and constructs in different programming languages, but Haskell’s “laziness” is unique. A full discussion is outside the scope of this article, but I thought that showing what happens with deferred type errors might be a gateway toward better understanding the execution model of Haskell.

Never reached

it "you can run code even if it contains ill-typed parts" $ do thisWorks `shouldBe` "hello"

This works because tuples in Haskell are lazy, and therefore in ordinary typechecking, taking the first element of a well-typed tuple succeeds no matter what is in the second element of the tuple. The difference when operating in deferred typechecking mode is that the tuple doesn’t even need to be well-typed, and the second element can be complete junk, as it is here. So this example is straightforward if you consider that what GHC does is somehow push the type error into a reasonably small context so that outside of it, things still typecheck and run normally.

Laziness all the way down

So what happens if we get the second element of the tuple, it is junk, and take its length?

it "deferred type errors are only lazily reached" $ do length thisFails `shouldBe` 2

The answer is that everything is still fine, because the embedded list inside the lazy tuple is a lazy list (because lists in Haskell are lazy), and length never looks at the elements of the list, only counts their number, so it passes over the junky thunk for "world" / True perfectly fine without needing to evaluate it.

Forcing the laziness

To explicitly force laziness into fully evaluated data (the kind of data in standard programming languages), we need to use the deepseq package. It’s work to fully, deeply evaluate something in Haskell! We use force from that package.

In order to catch, in HSpec, the exception we expect to finally get, we also need to use evaluate from Control.Exception in base , the main package of the ecosystem (discussed in a 2012 Day of Hackage post).

import Control.Exception (evaluate) import Control.DeepSeq (force)

Our test (which for simplicity is coarse in that it catches any exception, rather than the specific typechecking exception):

it "deferred type errors cause an exception only when reached" $ do evaluate (force thisFails) `shouldThrow` anyException

The deep evaluation will go all the way down to the junky expression in the list in the tuple of our example, and a typechecking error is thrown there at run time, as expected.

Suppose we were just evaluating thisFails from code, say within GHCi. This is what we get:

*Main> import ShouldNotTypecheckExample *Main ShouldNotTypecheckExample> thisFails "*** Exception: /Users/chen/Sync/haskell/twenty-four-days2015-of-hackage/src/ShouldNotTypecheckExample.hs:14:26: No instance for (Fractional Char) arising from a use of ‘/’ In the expression: "world" / True In the expression: ["world" / True, "!"] In the first argument of ‘snd’, namely ‘("hello", ["world" / True, "!"])’ (deferred type error)

Haskell is not really being dynamic here

So is Haskell dynamically typed then, when running in this mode? Not really. It’s faking it. What it’s basically doing is that the typechecker is still finding the type error at compile time, but then secretly creating the exception information at the site of the crappy code and replacing that code with a call to throw that exception. The technical details are in this paper.

This is completely different from the dynamic checking where nothing is checked at compile time and an error is discovered during the course of run time execution. Here, the error is discovered up front, stashed away, and kept a secret until or unless it is demanded.

For more on laziness and forcing

Simon Marlow’s free book “Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell” has chapters on evaluation strategies, starting with chapter 2. This stuff is subtle.

Conclusion

For day 5, I introduced the should-not-typecheck package and briefly discussed Haskell’s lazy evaluation and how it interacts with GHC’s deferred type errors. A later Day of Hackage will venture into the world of doing “real” dynamic typing in Haskell.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.