Answer Refinement Modification: Refinement Type System for Algebraic Effects and Handlers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel refinement type system for algebraic effects and handlers, enabling precise effect tracking and verification in effectful programs, with a focus on delimited continuations and practical implementation in OCaml 5.

Contribution

It proposes the answer refinement modification (ARM) concept, formalizes a sound type system supporting ARM, and demonstrates its practical utility through implementation and evaluation.

Findings

ARM effectively tracks effect occurrence and order.

The type system is sound and supports verification.

The approach is practical and applicable to OCaml 5.

Abstract

Algebraic effects and handlers are a mechanism to structure programs with computational effects in a modular way. They are recently gaining popularity and being adopted in practical languages, such as OCaml. Meanwhile, there has been substantial progress in program verification via refinement type systems. However, thus far there has not been a satisfactory refinement type system for algebraic effects and handlers. In this paper, we fill the void by proposing a novel refinement type system for algebraic effects and handlers. The expressivity and usefulness of algebraic effects and handlers come from their ability to manipulate delimited continuations, but delimited continuations also complicate programs' control flow and make their verification harder. To address the complexity, we introduce a novel concept that we call answer refinement modification (ARM for short), which allows the refinement type system to precisely track what effects occur and in what order when a program is executed, and reflect such information as modifications to the refinements in the types of delimited continuations. We formalize our type system that supports ARM (as well as answer type modification, or ATM) and prove its soundness. Additionally, as a proof of concept, we have implemented a corresponding type checking and inference algorithm for a subset of OCaml 5, and evaluated it on a number of benchmark programs. The evaluation demonstrates that ARM is conceptually simple and practically useful. Finally, a natural alternative to directly reasoning about a program with delimited continuations is to apply a continuation passing style (CPS) transformation that transforms the program to a pure program. We investigate this alternative, and show that the approach is indeed possible by proposing a novel CPS transformation for algebraic effects and handlers that enjoys bidirectional (refinement-)type-preservation.