T5: LiquidHaskell: Programming With Liquid Types in Haskell

  • Niki Vazou UC San Diego
September 03, 2015 1:30 - 5:00 PM

Abstract

Haskell has many delightful features, perhaps the most beloved of which is its type system which allows developers to specify and verify a variety of program properties at compile time. However, many properties, typically those that depend on relationships between program values are impossible, or at the very least, cumbersome to encode within Haskell's type system.

Liquid types enable the specification and verification of value-dependent properties by extending Haskell's type system with logical predicates drawn from efficiently decidable logics.

In this tutorial, we will start with a high level description of Liquid Types. Next, we will present an overview of LiquidHaskell, a liquid type checker for Haskell. In particular, we will describe the kinds of properties that can be checked, ranging from generic requirements like like totality (will 'head' crash?) and termination (will 'mergeSort' loop forever?), to application specific concerns like memory safety (will my code SEGFAULT?) and data structure correctness invariants (is this tree BALANCED?) .

Joint work with: Ranjit Jhala, Eric Seidel, Patrick Rondon, Dimitris Vytiniotis and Simon Peyton-Jones.

Tutorial objectives

The goal of the tutorial is to teach attendees about the basics of logic, and liquid types and they can use such types to design, specify and verify correctness of their programs.

The tools will be available over the web (see below) and can be accessed via a browser. However, ideally, the participants would require on their system (MacOs, Windows or Linux) a recent installation of Haskell (GHC-7.8.3 + cabal). After this the participants need to:

  1. Install Z3
  2. `cabal install liquidhaskell

The material will be drawn from a book on programming with refinement types that we are writing (in concert with the LiquidHaskell tool).

References:

In addition to the book (we will only touch a fraction during the workshop), the participants can learn more via introductory blog articles, as well as research papers listed at: http://goto.ucsd.edu/liquid

Target audience

Users, researchers, students of functional programming. Basic knowledge of OCaml, ML, Haskell or other typed higher-order functional language is assumed.

Niki Vazou

Niki Vazou

Niki Vazou is a PhD student studying type systems at UC San Diego. She works on liquidHaskell and tries to integrate formal verification into the standard Haskell development chain, by building an automatic, usuable and fast refinement type checker.