I’m busy revising the “How Idris works” paper, and you can find the latest draft here. Any further comments on how to improve it would be most welcome! Abstract:

Many components of a dependently typed programming language are by now well understood, for example the underlying type theory, type checking, unification and evaluation. How to combine these components into a realistic and usable high level language is, however, folklore, discovered anew by successive language implementations. In this paper, I describe the implementation of a new dependently typed functional programming language, IDRIS. IDRIS is intended to be a general purpose programming language and as such provides high level concepts such as implicit syntax, type classes and do notation. I describe the high level language and the underlying type theory, and present a method for elaborating concrete high level syntax with implicit arguments and type classes into a fully explicit type theory. Furthermore, I show how this method, based on a domain specific language embedded in Haskell, facilitates the implementation of new high level language constructs.