Facilitating Program Verification with Dependent Types Hongwei Xi Boston University

Talk Overview Motivation Detecting program errors (at compile-time) Detecting more program errors (at compile-time) Dependently typed programming languages Imperative: Xanadu Programming examples Current status and future work

A Wish List We would like to have a programming language that should be simple and general support extensive error checking facilitate proofs of program properties possess correct and efficient implementation But …

Reality Invariably, there are many conflicts among this wish list These conflicts must be resolved with careful attention paid to the needs of the user

Some Advantages of Types Capturing errors at compile-time Enabling compiler optimizations Facilitating program verification Using types to encode program properties and verifying the encoded properties through type- checking Serving as program documentation Unlike informal comments, types can be fully trusted after type-checking

Limitations of (Simple) Types Not general enough Many correct programs cannot be typed For instance, type casts are widely used in C Not specific enough Many interesting properties cannot be captured For instance, types in Java cannot handle safe array access

Dependent Types Dependent types are types that are more refined dependent on the values of expressions Examples int(i): singleton type containing only integer i array(n): type for integer arrays of size n

Examples of Dependent Types int(i,j) is defined as [a:int | i < a < j] int(a), that is, the sum of all types int(a) for i < a < j int[i,j), int(i,j], int[i,j] are defined similarly nat is defined as [a:int | a >=0] int(a)

Informal Program Comments /* the function should not be applied to a negative integer */ int factorial (x: int) { /* defensive programming */ if (x < 0) exit(1); if (x == 0) return 1; else return (x * factorial (x-1)); }

Formalizing Program Comments {n:nat} int factorial (x: int(n)) { if (x == 0) return 1; else return (x * factorial (x-1)); } Note: factorial (-1) is ill-typed and thus rejected!

Informal Program Comments /* arrays a and b are of equal size */ double dotprod (double a[], double b[]) { int i; double sum = 0.0; if (a.size != b.size) exit(1); for (i = 0; i < a.size; i = i + 1) { sum = sum + a[i]  b[i]; } return sum; }

Formalizing Program Comments {n:nat} double dotprod (a: array(n), b: array(n)) { /* dotprod is assigned the following type: {n:nat}. ( array(n), array(n)) -> float */ … … … }

Xanadu Xanadu is a dependently typed imperative programming language with C-like syntax The type of a variable in Xanadu can change during execution The programmer may need to provide dependent type annotations for type-checking purpose

Dependent Record Types (I) A polymorphic type for arrays: {n:nat} array(n) { size: int(n); data[n]: ‘a }

Dependent Record Types (II) A polymorphic type for 2-dimensional arrays: {m:nat,n:nat} array2(m,n) { row: int(m); col: int(n); data[m][n]: ‘a }

Dependent Record Types (III) A polymorphic type for sparse arrays: {m:nat,n:nat} sparseArray(m,n) { row: int(m); col: int(n); data[m]: list }

A Program in Xanadu {n:nat} unit init (int vec[n]) { var: int ind, size;; /* arraysize: {n:nat} array(n)  int(n) */ size = arraysize(vec); invariant: [i:nat] (ind: int(i)) for (ind=0; ind<size; ind=ind+1) { vec[ind] = ind; /* safe array subscripting */ }

Binary Search in Xanadu {n:nat} int bs(key: int, vec: array(n)) { var: l: int [0, n], h: int [-1, n); int m, x;; l = 0; h = vec.size - 1; while (l <= h) { m = (l + h) / 2; x = vec.data[m]; if (x < key) { l = m - 1; } else if (x > key) { h = m + 1; } else { return m; } } return –1; }

Dependent Union Types A polymorphic type for lists: union list with nat = { Nil(0); {n:nat} Cons(n+1) of ‘a  list(n) } Nil: list(0) Cons: {n:nat} ‘a  list(n)  list(n+1)

Reverse Append on Lists (‘a) {m:nat,n:nat} list(m+n) revApp (xs: list(m),ys: list(n)) { var: ‘a x;; invariant: [m1:nat,n1:nat | m1+n1=m+n] (xs: list(m1), ys: list(n1)) while (true) { switch (xs) { case Nil: return ys; case Cons (x, xs): ys = Cons(x, ys); } } exit; /* can never be reached */ }

Constraint Generation The following constraint is generated when the revApp example is type-checked: m:nat,n:nat,m1:nat,n1:nat,m1+n1=m+n,a:nat,m1=a+1 implies a+(n1+1)=m+n

Current Status of Xanadu A prototype implementation of Xanadu in Objective Caml that performs two-phase type-checking, and generates assembly level code An interpreter for interpreting assembly level code A variety of examples at

Conclusion (I) It is still largely an elusive goal in practice to verify the correctness of a program It is therefore important to identify those program properties that can be effectively verified for realistic programs

Conclusion (II) We have designed a type-theoretic approach to capturing simple arithmetic reasoning The preliminary studies indicate that this approach allows the programmer to capture many more properties in realistic programs while retaining practical type-checking

Future Work Adding more programming features into Xanadu in particular, OO features Certifying compilation: constructing a compiler for Xanadu that can translate dependent types from source level into bytecode level Incorporating dependent types into (a subset of) Java and …

End of the Talk Thank you! Questions?