II-NEW: Practical Pluggable Type Systems

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Buggy software costs the U.S. up to $60 billion annually, so preventing bugs is important to society. It is possible to prevent certain bugs by running a type-checker that analyzes a program to find all errors of a given type. Current type-checkers for mainstream programming languages are limited: there are too many bugs they cannot express and prevent. This project enables a programmer to extend and customize a type-checker. As a result, the type-checker can detect and prevent more errors, and in particular the errors that the programmer considers most important. The outcomes include design of new type systems for solving real-world programming problems; a framework for building custom type-checkers, in the context of an industrial language (Java); and significant experience with real codebases to evaluate the ideas and to generate new research questions. The framework will enable a community of researchers to more quickly and realistically evaluate their theories. This may encourage more relevant research and lead to more impact on practice.