Tagless staged interpreters for typed languages

• Authors: Emir PašaliΕ;Walid Taha;Tim Sheard
• Venue: Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
• Year: 2002

Multi-stage programming languages provide a convenient notation for explicitly staging programs. Staging a definitional interpreter for a domain specific language is one way of deriving an implementation that is both readable and efficient. In an untyped setting, staging an interpreter "removes a complete layer of interpretive overhead", just like partial evaluation. In a typed setting however, Hindley-Milner type systems do not allow us to exploit typing information in the language being interpreted. In practice, this can mean a slowdown cost by a factor of three or mor.Previously, both type specialization and tag elimination were applied to this problem. In this paper we propose an alternative approach, namely, expressing the definitional interpreter in a dependently typed programming language. We report on our experience with the issues that arise in writing such an interpreter and in designing such a language. .To demonstrate the soundness of combining staging and dependent types in a general sense, we formalize our language (called Meta-D) and prove its type safety. To formalize Meta-D, we extend Shao, Saha, Trifonov and Papaspyrou's λH language to a multi-level setting. Building on λH allows us to demonstrate type safety in a setting where the type language contains all the calculus of inductive constructions, but without having to repeat the work needed for establishing the soundness of that system.