The EPI Gallinette aims at developing a new generation of proof assistants, with the belief that practical experiments must go in pair with foundational investigations:
Software quality is a requirement that is becoming more and more prevalent,
by now far exceeding the traditional scope of embedded systems. The
development of tools to construct software that respects a given specification
is a major challenge facing computer science. Proof assistants
such as Coq 54 provide a formal method whose central
innovation is to produce certified programs by transforming
the very activity of programming. Programming and proving are merged
into a single development activity, informed by an elegant but rigid
mathematical theory inspired by the correspondence between programming,
logic and algebra: the Curry-Howard correspondence. For the
certification of programs, this approach has shown its efficiency
in the development of important pieces of certified software such
as the C compiler of the CompCert project 83.
The extracted CompCert compiler is reliable and efficient, running
only 15% slower than GCC 4 at optimisation level 2 (gcc -O2),
a level of optimisation that was considered before to be highly unreliable.
Proof assistants can also be used to formalise mathematical
theories: they not only provide a means of representing mathematical
theories in a form amenable to computer processing, but their internal
logic provides a language for reasoning about such theories. In the
last decade, proof assistants have been used to verify extremely large
and complicated proofs of recent mathematical results, sometimes requiring
either intensive computations 65, 69
or intricate combinations of a multitude of mathematical theories
64. But formalised mathematics is more than just proof
checking and proof assistants can help with organisation mathematical
knowledge or even with the discovery of new constructions and proofs.
Unfortunately, the rigidity of the theory behind proof assistants impedes their expressiveness both as programming languages and as logical systems. For instance, a program extracted from Coq only uses a purely functional subset of OCaml, leaving behind important means of expression such as side-effects and objects. Limitations also appear in the formalisation of advanced mathematics: proof assistants do not cope well with classical axioms such as excluded middle and choice which are sometimes used crucially. The fact of the matter is that the development of proof assistants cannot be dissociated from a reflection on the nature of programs and proofs coming from the Curry-Howard correspondence. In the EPC Gallinette, we propose to address several drawbacks of proof assistants by pushing the boundaries of this correspondence.
In the 1970's, the Curry-Howard correspondence was seen as a perfect match between functional programs, intuitionistic logic, and Cartesian closed categories. It received several generalisations over the decades, and now it is more widely understood as a fertile correspondence between computation, logic, and algebra. Nowadays, the view of the Curry-Howard correspondence has evolved from a perfect match to a collection of theories meant to explain similar structures at work in logic and computation, underpinned by mathematical abstractions. By relaxing the requirement of a perfect match between programs and proofs, and instead emphasising the common foundations of both, the insights of the Curry-Howard correspondence may be extended to domains for which the requirements of programming and mathematics may in fact be quite different.
Consider the following two major theories of the past decades, which were until recently thought to be irreconcilable:
We now outline a series of scientific challenges aimed at understanding of type theory, effects, and their combination.
More precisely, three key axes of improvement have been identified:
To validate the new paradigms, we propose in Section 3.5 three particular application fields in which members of the team already have a strong expertise: code refactoring, constraint programming and symbolic computation.
The democratisation of proof assistants based on type theory has likely been impeded by one central problem: the mismatch between the conception of equality in mathematics and its formalisation in type theory. Indeed, some basic principles that are used implicitly in mathematics—such as Church’s principle of propositional extensionality, which says that two propositions are equal when they are logically equivalent—are not derivable in type theory. Even more problematically, from a computer science point of view, the basic concept of two functions being equal when they are equal at every “point” of their domain is also not derivable: rather, it must be added as an additional axiom. Of course, these principles are consistent with type theory so that working under the corresponding additional assumptions is safe. But the use of these assumptions in a definition potentially clutters its computational behaviour: since axioms are computational black boxes, computation gets stuck at the points of the code where they have been used.
We propose to investigate how expressive logical transformations such as forcing 75 and sheaf construction might be used to enhance the computational and logical power of proof assistants—with a particular emphasis on their implementation in the Coq proof assistant by the means of effective translations (or compilation phases). One of the main topics of this task, in connection to the ERC project CoqHoTT, is the integration in Coq of new concepts inspired by homotopy type theory 103 such as the univalence principle, and higher inductive types.
In the Coq proof assistant, the sort proof
irrelevance, can be expressed formally as: raison d'être of the sort
The univalence principle is becoming widely accepted as a very promising
avenue to provide new foundations for mathematics and type theory.
However, this principle has not yet been incorporated into a proof
assistant. Indeed, the very mathematical structures (known as
Hence a major objective is to achieve a complete internalisation of univalence in intensional type theory, including an integration to a new version of Coq. We will strive to keep compatibility with previous versions, in particular from a performance point of view. Indeed, the additional complexity of homotopy type theory should not induce an overhead in the type checking procedure used by the software if we want our new framework to become rapidly adopted by the community. Concretely, we will make sure that the compilation time of Coq’s Standard Library will be of the same order of magnitude.
Extending the power of a logic using model transformations (e.g.,
forcing transformation 76, 75 or the sheaf
construction 106) is a classic topic of mathematical
logic 50, 81. However, these ideas have
not been much investigated in the setting of type theory, even though
they may provide a useful framework for extending the logical power
of proof assistant in a modular way. There is a good reason for this:
with a syntactic notion of equality, the underlying structure of type
theory does not conform to the structure of topos used in mathematical
logic. A direct incorporation of the standard techniques is therefore
not possible. However, a univalent notion of equality brings type
theory closer to the required algebraic structure, as it corresponds
to the notion of
The Gallinette project advocates the use of distinct compilation phases as a methodology for the design of a new generation of proof assistants featuring modular extensions of a core logic. The essence of a compiler is the separation of the complexity of a translation process into modular stages, and the organization of their re-composition. This idea finds a natural application in the design of complex proof assistants (Figure 1). For instance, the definition of type classes in Coq follows this pattern, and is morally given by the means of a translation into a type-class free kernel. More recently, a similar approach by compilation stages, using the forcing transformation, was used to relax the strict positivity condition guarding inductive types 76, 75. We believe that this flavour of compilation-based strategies offers a promising direction of investigation for the purpose of defining a decidable type checking algorithm for HoTT.
We propose the incorporation of effects in the theory of proof assistants at a foundational level. Not only would this allow for certified programming with effects, but it would moreover have implications for both semantics and logic.
We mean effects in a broad sense that encompasses both Moggi's
monads 95 and Girard's linear
logic 62. These two seminal works have given rise to respective
theories of effects (monads) and resources (co-monads). Recent advances,
however have unified these two lines of thought: it is now clear that
the defining feature of effects, in the broad sense, is sensitivity
to evaluation order 84, 55.
In contrast, the type theory that forms the foundations of proof assistants
is based on pure “the next
difficult step [...] currently under investigation”.
Any realistic program contains effects: state, exceptions, input-output.
More generally, evaluation order may simply be important for complexity
reasons. With this in mind, many works have focused on certified programming
with effects: notably Ynot 100, and more recently
We propose to develop the foundations of a type theory with effects
taking into account the logical and semantic aspects, and to study
their practical and theoretical consequences. A type theory that integrates
effects would have logical, algebraic and computational implications
when viewed through the Curry-Howard correspondence. For instance,
effects such as control operators establish a link with classical
proof theory 67. Indeed, control
operators provide computational interpretations of type isomorphisms
such as
The goal is to develop a type theory with effects that accounts both for practical experiments in certified programming, and for clues from denotational semantics and logical phenomena, in a unified setting.
A crucial step is the integration of dependent types with effects,
a topic which has remained “currently under investigation”
96 ever since the beginning. The difficulty resides
in expressing the dependency of types on terms that can perform side-effects
during the computation. On the side of denotational semantics, several
extensions of categorical models for effects with dependent types
have been proposed 33, 113 using axioms that should
correspond to restrictions in terms of expressivity but whose practical
implications, however, are not immediately transparent. On the side
of logical approaches 71, 72, 82, 94,
one first considers a drastic restriction to terms that do not compute,
which is then relaxed by semantic means. On the side of systems for
certified programming such as
Thus, the recurring idea is to introduce restrictions on the dependency
in order to establish an encapsulation of effects. In our approach,
we seek a principled description of this idea by developing the concept
of semantic value (thunkables, linears) which arose from foundational
considerations 61, 108, 98 and
whose relevance was highlighted in recent works 85, 102.
The novel aspect of our approach is to seek a proper extension of
type theory which would provide foundations for a classical type theory
with axiom of choice in the style of Herbelin 71,
but which moreover could be generalised to effects other than just
control by exploiting an abstract and adaptable notion of semantic
value.
In our view, the common idea that evaluation order does not matter
for pure and terminating computations should serve as a bridge between
our proposals for dependent types in the presence of effects and traditional
type theory. Building on the previous goal, we aim to study the relationship
between semantic values, purity, and parametricity theorems 107, 63.
Our goal is to characterise parametricity as a form of intuitionistic
depolarisation following the method by which the first game model
of full linear logic was given (Melliès 91, 92).
We have two expected outcomes in mind: enriching type theory with
intensional content without losing its properties, and giving an explanation
of the dependent types in the style of Idris and
An integrated type theory with effects requires an understanding of
evaluation order from the point of view of rewriting. For instance,
rewriting properties can entail the decidability of some conversions,
allowing the automation of equational reasoning in types 31.
They can also provide proofs of computational consistency (that terms
are not all equivalent) by showing that extending calculi with new
constructs is conservative 110. In our approach,
the
One goal is to prove computational consistency or decidability of conversions purely using advanced rewriting techniques following a technique introduced in 110. Another goal is the characterisation of weak reductions: extensions of the operational semantics to terms with free variables that preserve termination, whose iteration is equivalent to strong reduction 32, 59. We aim to show that such properties derive from generic theorems of higher-order rewriting 115, so that weak reduction can easily be generalised to richer systems with effects.
Proof theory and rewriting are a source of coherence theorems
in category theory, which show how calculations in a category can
be simplified with an embedding into a structure with stronger properties
89, 80. We aim to explore such results
for categorical models of effects 84, 55. Our key
insight is to consider the reflection between indirect and direct
models 61, 98 as a coherence theorem:
it allows us to embed the traditional models of effects into structures
for which the rewriting and proof-theoretic techniques from the previous
section are effective.
Building on this, we are further interested in connecting operational
semantics to 2-category theory, in which a second dimension is traditionally
considered for modelling conversions of programs rather than equivalences.
This idea has been successfully applied for the
The unified theory of effects and resources 55 prompts an investigation into the semantics of safe and automatic resource management, in the style of Modern C++ and Rust. Our goal is to show how advanced semantics of effects, resources, and their combination arise by assembling elementary blocks, pursuing the methodology applied by Melliès and Tabareau in the context of continuations 93. For instance, combining control flow (exceptions, return) with linearity allows us to describe in a precise way the “Resource Acquisition Is Initialisation” idiom in which the resource safety is ensured with scope-based destructors. A further step would be to reconstruct uniqueness types and borrowing using similar ideas.
The development of tools to construct software systems that respect
a given specification is a major challenge of current and future research
in computer science. Certified programming with dependent types has
recently attracted a lot of interest, and Coq is the de facto
standard for such endeavours, with an increasing number of users,
pedagogical resources, and large-scale projects. Nevertheless, significant
work remains to be done to make Coq more usable from a software engineering
point of view. The Gallinette team proposes to make progress on three
lines of work: (i) the development of gradual certified programming,
(ii) the integration of imperative features and object polymorphism
in Coq, and (iii) the development of robust tactics for proof engineering
for the scaling of formalised libraries.
One of the main issues faced by a programmer starting to internalise in a proof assistant code written in a more permissive world is that type theory is constrained by a strict type discipline which lacks flexibility. Concretely, as soon as you start giving a more precise type/specification to a function, the rest of the code interacting with this function needs to be more precise too. To address this issue, the Gallinette team will put strong efforts into the development of gradual typing in type theory to allow progressive integration of code that comes from a more permissive world.
Indeed, on the way to full verification, programmers can take advantage of a gradual approach in which some properties are simply asserted instead of proven, subject to dynamic verification. Tabareau and Tanter have made preliminary progress in this direction 112. This work, however, suffers from a number of limitations, the most important being the lack of a mechanism for handling the possibility of runtime errors within Coq. Instead of relying on axioms, this project will explore the application of Section 3.3 to embed effects in Coq. This way, instead of postulating axioms for parts of the development that are too hard/marginal to be dealt with, the system adds dynamic checks. Then, after extraction, we get a program that corresponds to the initial program but with dynamic checks for parts that have not been proven, ensuring that the program will raise an error instead of going outside its specification.
This will yield new foundations of gradual certified programming, both more expressive and practical. We will also study how to integrate previous techniques with the extraction mechanism of Coq programs to OCaml, in order to exploit the exception mechanism of OCaml.
Abstract data types (ADTs) become useful as the size of programs grows
since they provide for a modular approach, allowing abstractions about
data to be expressed and then instantiated. Moreover, ADTs are natural
concepts in the calculus of inductive constructions. But while it
is easy to declare an ADT, it is often difficult to implement an efficient
one. Compare this situation with, for example, Okasaki's purely functional
data structures 101 which implement ADTs like queues
in languages with imperative features. Of course, Okasaki's queues
enforce some additional properties for free, such as persistence,
but the programmer may prefer to use and to study a simpler implementation
without those additional properties. Also in certified symbolic computation
(see 3.5.3), an efficient functional
implementation of ADTs is often not available, and efficiency is a
major challenge in this area. Relying on the theoretical work done
in 3.3, we will equip Coq with imperative
features and we will demonstrate how they can be used to provide efficient
implementations of ADTs. However, it is also often the case that imperative
implementations are hard-to-reason-on, requiring for instance the use
of separation logic. But in that case, we benefit from recent
works on integration of separation logic in the Coq proof assistant
and in particular the Iris project http://
Object-oriented programming has evolved since its foundation based on the representation of computations as an exchange of messages between objects. In modern programming languages like Scala, which aims at a synthesis between object-oriented and functional programming, object-orientation concretely results in the use of hierarchies of interfaces ordered by the subtyping relation and the definition of interface implementations that can interoperate. As observed by Cook and Aldrich 53, 35, interoperability can be considered as the essential feature of objects and is a requirement for many modern frameworks and ecosystems: it means that two different implementations of the same interface can interoperate.
Our objective is to provide a representation of object-oriented programs, by focusing on subtyping and interoperability.
For subtyping, the natural solution in type theory is coercive subtyping 87, as implemented in Coq, with an explicit operator for coercions. This should lead to a shallow embedding, but has limitations: indeed, while it allows subtyping to be faithfully represented, it does not provide a direct means to represent union and intersection types, which are often associated with subtyping (for instance intersection types are present in Scala). A more ambitious solution would be to resort to subsumptive subtyping (or semantic subtyping 60): in its more general form, a type algebra is extended with boolean operations (union, intersection, complementing) to get a boolean algebra with operators (the original type constructors). Subtyping is then interpreted as the natural partial order of the boolean algebra.
We propose to use the type class machinery of Coq to implement semantic subtyping for dependent type theory. Using type class resolution, we can emulate inference rules of subsumptive subtyping without modifying Coq internally. This has also another advantage. As subsumptive subtyping for dependent types should be undecidable in general, using type class resolution allows for an incomplete yet extensible decision procedure.
When developing certified software, a major part of the effort is
spent not only on writing proof scripts, but on rewriting them,
either for the purpose of code maintenance or because of more significant
changes in the base definitions. Regrettably, proof scripts suffer
more often than not from a bad programming style, and too many proof
developers casually neglect the most elementary principles of well-behaved
programmers. As a result, many proof scripts are very brittle, user-defined
tactics are often difficult to extend, and sometimes even lack a clear
specification. Formal libraries are thus generally very fragile pieces
of software. One reason for this unfortunate situation is that proof
engineering is very badly served by the tools currently available
to the users of the Coq proof assistant, starting with its tactic
language. One objective of the Gallinette team is to develop better
tools to write proof scripts.
Completing and maintaining a large corpus of formalised mathematics
requires a well-designed tactic language. This language should both
accommodate the possible specific needs of the theories at stake,
and help with diagnostics at refactoring time. Coq's tactic language
is in fact two-leveled. First, it includes a basic tactic language,
to organise the deductive steps in a proof script and to perform the
elementary bureaucracy. Its second layer is a meta-programming language,
which allows users to define their own new tactics at toplevel. Our
first direction of work consists in the investigation of the appropriate
features of the basic tactic language. For instance, the design
of the Ssreflect tactic language, and its support for the small scale
reflection methodology 66, has been a
key ingredient in at least two large scale formalisation endeavours:
the Four Colour Theorem 65 and of the Odd Order
Theorem 64. Building on our experience with the Ssreflect
tactic language, we will contribute to the ongoing work on the basic
tactic language for Coq. The second objective of this task is to contribute
to the design of a typed tactic language. In particular, we
will build on the work of Ziliani and his collaborators 114,
extending it with reasoning about the effects that tactics have on
the “state of a proof” (e.g. number of sub-goals, metavariables in
context). We will also develop a novel approach for incremental type
checking of proof scripts, so that programmers gain access to a richer
discovery- engineering interaction with the proof assistant.
The first three axes of the EPC Gallinette aim at developing a new generation of proof assistants. But we strongly believe that foundational investigations must go hand in hand with practical experiments. Therefore, we expect to benefit from existing expertise and collaborations in the team to experiment our extensions of Coq on real world developments. It should be noticed that those practical experiments are strongly guided by the deep history of research on software engineering of team members.
In the context of refactoring of C programs, we intend to formalise program transformations that are written in an imperative style to test the usability of our addition of effects in the proof assistant. This subject has been chosen based on the competence of members of the team.
We are currently working on the formalisation of refactoring tools in Coq 52. Automatic refactoring of programs in industrial languages is difficult because of the large number of potential interactions between language features that are difficult to predict and to test. Indeed, all available refactoring tools suffer from bugs : they fail to ensure that the generated program has the same behaviour as the input program. To cope with that difficulty, we have chosen to build a refactoring tool with Coq : a program transformation is written in the Coq programming language, then proven correct on all possible inputs, and then an OCaml executable program is generated by the platform. We rely on the CompCert C formalisation of the C language. CompCert is currently the most complete formalisation of an industrial language, which justifies that choice. We have three goals in that project :
We plan to make use of the internalisation of the object-oriented paradigm in the context of constraint programming. Indeed, this domain is made of very complex algorithms that are often developed using object-oriented programming (as it is the case for instance for CHOCO, which is developed in the Tasc Group at IMT Atlantique, Nantes). We will in particular focus on filtering algorithms in constraint solvers, for which research publications currently propose new algorithms with manual proofs. Their formalisation in Coq is challenging. Another interesting part of constraint solving to formalise is the part that deals with program generation (as opposed to extraction). However, when there are numerous generated pieces of code, it is not realistic to prove their correctness manually, and it can be too difficult to prove the correctness of a generator. So we intend to explore a middle path that consists in generating a piece of code along with its corresponding proof (script or proof term). A target application could be interval constraints (for instance Allen interval algebra or region connection calculus) that can generate thousands of specialised filtering algorithms for a small number of variables 41.
Finally, Rémi Douence has already worked (articles publishing 68, 105, 58, 42, 39, 38, PhD Thesis advising 104, 40) with different members of the Tasc team. Currently, he supervises with Nicolas Beldiceanu the PhD Thesis of Jovial Cheukam Ngouonou in the Tasc team. He studies graph invariants to enhance learning algorithms. This work requires proofs, manually done for now, we would like to explore when these proofs could be mechanized.
We will investigate how the addition of effects in the Coq proof assistant can facilitate the marriage of computer algebra with formal proofs. Computer algebra systems on one hand, and proof assistants on the other hand, are both designed for doing mathematics with the help of a computer, by the means of symbolic computations. These two families of systems are however very different in nature: computer algebra systems allow for implementations faithful to the theoretical complexity of the algorithms, whereas proof assistants have the expressiveness to specify exactly the semantics of the data-structures and computations.
Experiments have been run that link computer algebra systems with Coq 57, 47. These bridges rely on the implementation of formal proof-producing core algorithms like normalisation procedures. Incidentally, they require non trivial maintenance work to survive the evolution of both systems. Other proof assistants like the Isabelle/HOL system make use of so-called reflection schemes: the proof assistant can produce code in an external programming language like SML, but also allows to import the values output by these extracted programs back inside the formal proofs. This feature extends the trusted base of code quite significantly but it has been used for major achievements like a certified symbolic/numeric ODE solver 74.
We would like to bring Coq closer to the efficiency and user-friendliness of computer algebra systems: for now it is difficult to use the Coq programming language so that certified implementations of computer algebra algorithms have the right, observable, complexity when they are executed inside Coq. We see the addition of effects to the proof assistant as an opportunity to ease these implementations, for instance by making use of caching mechanisms or of profiling facilities. Such enhancements should enable the verification of computation-intensive mathematical proofs that are currently beyond reach, like the validation of Helfgott's proof of the weak Goldbach conjecture 70.
Equations is a tool designed to help with the definition of programs in the setting of dependent type theory, as implemented in the Coq proof assistant. Equations provides a syntax for defining programs by dependent pattern-matching and well-founded recursion and compiles them down to the core type theory of Coq, using the primitive eliminators for inductive types, accessibility and equality. In addition to the definitions of programs, it also automatically derives useful reasoning principles in the form of propositional equations describing the functions, and an elimination principle for calls to this function. It realizes this using a purely definitional translation of high-level definitions to core terms, without changing the core calculus in any way, or using axioms.
The main features of Equations include:
Dependent pattern-matching in the style of Agda/Epigram, with inaccessible patterns, with and where clauses. The use of the K axiom or a proof of K is configurable, and it is able to solve unification problems without resorting to the K rule if not necessary.
Support for well-founded and mutual recursion using measure/well-foundedness annotations, even on indexed inductive types, using an automatic derivation of the subterm relation for inductive families.
Support for mutual and nested structural recursion using with and where auxilliary definitions, allowing to factor multiple uses of the same nested fixpoint definition. It proves the expected elimination principles for mutual and nested definitions.
Automatic generation of the defining equations as rewrite rules for every definition.
Automatic generation of the unfolding lemma for well-founded definitions (requiring only functional extensionality).
Automatic derivation of the graph of the function and its elimination principle. In case the automation fails to prove these principles, the user is asked to provide a proof.
A new dependent elimination tactic based on the same splitting tree compilation scheme that can advantageously replace dependent destruction and sometimes inversion as well. The as clause of dependent elimination allows to specify exactly the patterns and naming of new variables needed for an elimination.
A set of Derive commands for automatic derivation of constructions from an inductive type: its signature, no-confusion property, well-founded subterm relation and decidable equality proof, if applicable.
Equations is a function definition plugin for Coq (supporting Coq 8.11 to 8.13, with special support for the Coq-HoTT library), that allows the definition of functions by dependent pattern-matching and well-founded, mutual or nested structural recursion and compiles them into core terms. It automatically derives the clauses equations, the graph of the function and its associated elimination principle.
Equations is based on a simplification engine for the dependent equalities appearing in dependent eliminations that is also usable as a separate tactic, providing an axiom-free variant of dependent destruction.
This version of Equations is based on an improved simplification engine for the dependent equalities appearing during dependent eliminations that is also usable as a separate dependent elimination tactic, providing an axiom-free variant of dependent destruction and a more powerful form of inversion.
This is a bugfix release of version 1.2 working with Coq 8.11 to Coq 8.13 See https://mattam82.github.io/Coq-Equations/equations/2019/05/17/1.2.html for the 1.2 release notes. New in this version:
Fixed issue #297: dependent elimination simplification mistreated let-bindings Fixed issue #295: discrepancy between the syntax in the manual and the implementation Ensure that NoConfusion is derived before EqDec as it is necessary to solve the corresponding obligation.
The MetaCoq project aims to provide a certified meta-programming environment in Coq. It builds on Template-Coq, a plugin for Coq originally implemented by Malecha (Extensible proof engineering in intensional type theory, Harvard University, 2014), which provided a reifier for Coq terms and global declarations, as represented in the Coq kernel, as well as a denotation command. Recently, it was used in the CertiCoq certified compiler project (Anand et al., in: CoqPL, Paris, France, 2017), as its front-end language, to derive parametricity properties (Anand and Morrisett, in: CoqPL’18, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2018). However, the syntax lacked semantics, be it typing semantics or operational semantics, which should reflect, as formal specifications in Coq, the semantics of Coq ’s type theory itself. The tool was also rather bare bones, providing only rudimentary quoting and unquoting commands. MetaCoq generalizes it to handle the entire polymorphic calculus of cumulative inductive constructions, as implemented by Coq, including the kernel’s declaration structures for definitions and inductives, and implement a monad for general manipulation of Coq’s logical environment. The MetaCoq framework allows Coq users to define many kinds of general purpose plugins, whose correctness can be readily proved in the system itself, and that can be run efficiently after extraction. Examples of implemented plugins include a parametricity translation and a certified extraction to call-by-value lambda-calculus. The meta-theory of Coq itself is verified in MetaCoq along with verified conversion, type-checking and erasure procedures providing higly trustable alternatives to the procedures in Coq's OCaml kernel. MetaCoq is hence a foundation for the development of higher-level certified tools on top of Coq's kernel. A meta-programming and proving framework for Coq.
MetaCoq is made of 4 main components: - The entry point of the project is the Template-Coq quoting and unquoting library for Coq which allows quotation and denotation of terms between three variants of the Coq AST: the OCaml one used by Coq's kernel, the Coq one defined in MetaCoq and the one defined by the extraction of the MetaCoq AST, allowing to extract OCaml plugins from Coq implementations. - The PCUIC component is a full formalization of Coq's typing and reduction rules, along with proofs of important metatheoretic properties: weakening, substitution, validity, subject reduction and principality. The PCUIC calculus differs slightly from the Template-Coq one and verified translations between the two are provided. - The checker component contains verified implementations of weak-head reduction, conversion and type inference for the PCUIC calculus, along with a verified checker for Coq theories. - The erasure compoment contains a verified implementation of erasure/extraction from PCUIC to untyped (call-by-value) lambda calculus extended with a dummy value for erased terms.
Some highlights from this release are:
- Introduction of primitive persistent arrays in the core language, implemented using imperative persistent arrays. - Introduction of definitional proof irrelevance for the equality type defined in the SProp sort. - Many improvements to the handling of notations, including number notations, recursive notations and notations with bindings. A new algorithm chooses the most precise notation available to print an expression, which might introduce changes in printing behavior.
See the Zenodo citation for more information on this release: https://zenodo.org/record/4501022#.YB00r5NKjlw
Coq version 8.13 integrates many usability improvements, as well as extensions of the core language. The main changes include: - Introduction of primitive persistent arrays in the core language, implemented using imperative persistent arrays. - Introduction of definitional proof irrelevance for the equality type defined in the SProp sort. - Cumulative record and inductive type declarations can now specify the variance of their universes. - Various bugfixes and uniformization of behavior with respect to the use of implicit arguments and the handling of existential variables in declarations, unification and tactics. - New warning for unused variables in catch-all match branches that match multiple distinct patterns. - New warning for Hint commands outside sections without a locality attribute, whose goal is to eventually remove the fragile default behavior of importing hints only when using Require. The recommended fix is to declare hints as export, instead of the current default global, meaning that they are imported through Require Import only, not Require. See the following rationale and guidelines for details. - General support for boolean attributes. - Many improvements to the handling of notations, including number notations, recursive notations and notations with bindings. A new algorithm chooses the most precise notation available to print an expression, which might introduce changes in printing behavior. - Tactic improvements in lia and its zify preprocessing step, now supporting reasoning on boolean operators such as Z.leb and supporting primitive integers Int63. - Typing flags can now be specified per-constant / inductive. - Improvements to the reference manual including updated syntax descriptions that match Coq's grammar in several chapters, and splitting parts of the tactics chapter to independent sections.
See the changelog for an overview of the new features and changes, along with the full list of contributors. https://coq.github.io/doc/v8.13/refman/changes.html#version-8-13
Memprof-limits is an implementation of per-thread global memory limits, and per-thread allocation limits à la Haskell, for OCaml, compatible with multiple threads.
Memprof-limits interrupts the execution by raising an asynchronous exception: an exception that can arise at almost any location in the program. It is provided with a guide on how to recover from asynchronous exceptions and other unexpected exceptions, thereby summarising practical knowledge acquired in OCaml by the Coq proof assistant as well as in other programming languages, to my knowledge told here for the first time.
Memprof-limits is probabilistic, as it is based on the statistical memory accountant memprof. It is provided with a statistical analysis that the user can rely on to have guarantees about the enforcement of limits.
Memprof-limits is a probabilistic implementation of per-thread global memory limits, and per-thread allocation limits, for the OCaml language.
Per-thread global memory limits let you bound the memory consumption of specific parts of your program, in terms of memory used by the whole program.
Per-thread allocation limits let you bound the execution of parts of the program measured in number of allocation, analogous to the same feature in Haskell. Allocation limits count allocations but not deallocations, and is therefore a measure of the work done which can be more suitable than execution time.
In 12, we have proposed a framework to study contextual equivalence of programs written in a call-by-value functional language with local integer references. It reduces the problem of contextual equivalence to the problem of non-reachability in a transition system of memory configurations. This reduction is complete for recursion-free programs. Restricting to programs that do not allocate references inside the body of functions, we have encoded this non-reachability problem as a set of constrained Horn clauses that can then be checked for satisfiability automatically. Restricting furthermore to a language with finite data-types, we also get a new decidability result for contextual equivalence at any type.
Thanks to several works on classical logic in proof theory, it is now well-established that continuation-passing style (CPS) translations in call by name and call by value correspond to different polarisations of formulae. Extending this observation and building on Curien and Herbelin’s abstract-machine-like calculi, a term assignment has been proposed for a polarised sequent calculus (where the polarities of formulae determine the evaluation order) in which various calculi from the literature can be obtained with macros responsible for the choices of polarities. It aims to explain several CPS translations from the literature by decomposing them through a single CPS for sequent calculus. It has later proved to be a fruitful setting to study the addition of effects and resource modalities, providing a categorical proof theory of Call By Push Value semantics. In 22, we propose to bring together a dependently-typed theory (ECC) and polarised sequent calculus, by presenting a calculus Ldep suitable as a vehicle for compilation and representation of effectful computations. As a first step in that direction, we show that Ldep advantageously factorizes a dependently typed continuation-passing style translation for ECC+call/cc. To avoid the inconsistency of type theory with control operators, we restrict their interaction. Nonetheless, in the pure case, we obtain an unrestricted translation from ECC to itself, thus opening the door to the definition of dependently typed compilation transformations.
In an impressive series of papers, Krivine showed at the edge of the last decade how classical realizability provides a surprising technique to build models for classical theories. In particular, he proved that classical realizability subsumes Cohen’s forcing, and even more, gives rise to unexpected models of set theories. Pursuing the algebraic analysis of these models that was first undertaken by Streicher, Miquel recently proposed to lay the algebraic foundation of classical realizability and forcing within new structures which he called implicative algebras. These structures are a generalization of Boolean algebras based on an internal law representing the implication. Notably, implicative algebras allow for the adequate interpretation of both programs (i.e. proofs) and their types (i.e. formulas) in the same structure. The very definition of implicative algebras takes position on a presentation of logic through universal quantification and the implication and, computationally, relies on the call-by-name λ-calculus. In 19, we investigate the relevance of this choice, by introducing two similar structures. On the one hand, we define disjunctive algebras, which rely on internal laws for the negation and the disjunction and which we show to be particular cases of implicative algebras. On the other hand, we introduce conjunctive algebras, which rather put the focus on conjunctions and on the call-by-value evaluation strategy. We finally show how disjunctive and conjunctive algebras algebraically reflect the well-known duality of computation between call-by-name and call-by-value.
In 8, we study reduction monads, which are essentially the same as monads relative to the free functor from sets into multigraphs. Reduction monads account for two aspects of the lambda calculus: on the one hand, in the monadic viewpoint, the lambda calculus is an object equipped with a well-behaved substitution; on the other hand, in the graphical viewpoint, it is an oriented multigraph whose vertices are terms and whose edges witness the reductions between two terms. We study presentations of reduction monads. To this end, we propose a notion of reduction signature. As usual, such a signature plays the role of a virtual presentation, and specifies arities for generating operations-possibly subject to equations-together with arities for generating reduction rules. For each such signature, we define a category of models; any model is, in particular, a reduction monad. If the initial object of this category of models exists, we call it the reduction monad presented (or specified) by the given reduction signature. Our main result identifies a class of reduction signatures which specify a reduction monad in the above sense. We show in the examples that our approach covers several standard variants of the lambda calculus.
18 is a contribution to the search for efficient and high-level mathematical tools to specify and reason about (abstract) programming languages or calculi. Generalising the reduction monads of Ahrens et al., we introduce operational monads, thus covering new applications such as the-calculus, Positive GSOS specifications, and the big-step, simply-typed, call-by-value-calculus. Finally, we design a notion of signature for operational monads that covers all our examples.
Chiralities are categories introduced by Mellies to account for a game semantics point of view on negation. In 29, we uncover instances of this structure in the theory of topological vector spaces, thus constructing several new polarized models of Multiplicative Linear Logic. These models improve previously known smooth models of Differential Linear Logic, showing the relevance of chiralities to express topological properties of vector spaces. They are the first denotational polarized models of Multiplicative Linear Logic, based on the pre-existing theory of topological vector spaces, in which two distinct sets of formulas, two distinct negations, and two shifts appear naturally.
The current multicore OCaml implementation bans so-called "naked pointers", pointers to outside the heap owned by the OCaml garbage collector, unless these pointers follow drastic restrictions. A backwards-incompatible change has been proposed to make way for the new multicore GC in OCaml. Building on our investigations for the design of a resource-management extension for OCaml, we argued in 23 that out-of-heap pointers are not an anomaly, but are part of a better mixing of systems and functional programming, and we designed an alternative approach that would better preserve the backwards-compatiblity aims of OCaml multicore without affecting performances.
There is a critical tension between substitution, dependent elimination and effects in type theory. In this paper, we crystallize this tension in the form of a no-go theorem that constitutes the fire triangle of type theory. To release this tension, we propose in 13 DCBPV, an extension of call-by-push-value (CBPV)-a general calculus of effects-to dependent types. Then, by extending to CBPV the well-known decompositions of call-by-name and call-by-value into CBPV, we show why, in presence of effects, dependent elimination must be restricted in call-by-name, and substitution must be restricted in call-by-value. To justify DCBPV and show that it is general enough to interpret many kinds of effects, we define various effectful syntactic translations from DCBPV to Martin-Löf type theory: the reader, weaning and forcing translations.
Acknowledging the ordeal of a fully formal development in a proof assistant such as Coq, we have investigated in 27 gradual variations on the Calculus of Inductive Construction (CIC) for swifter prototyping with imprecise types and terms. We observe, with a no-go theorem, a crucial tradeoff between graduality and the key properties of canonicity, decidability and closure of universes under dependent product that CIC enjoys. Beyond this Fire Triangle of Graduality, we explore the gradualization of CIC with three different compromises, each relaxing one edge of the Fire Triangle. We develop a parametrized presentation of Gradual CIC that encompasses all three variations, and jointly develop their metatheory. We first present a bidirectional elaboration of Gradual CIC to a dependently-typed cast calculus, which elucidates the interrelation between typing, conversion, and graduality. We then establish the metatheory of this cast calculus through both a syntactic model into CIC, which provides weak canonicity, confluence, and when applicable, normalization, and a monotone model that purports the study of the graduality of two of the three variants. This work informs and paves the way towards the development of malleable proof assistants and dependently-typed programming languages.
In 9, we prove that the folk model category structure on the category of strict
Model categories constitute the major context for doing homotopy theory. More recently, Homotopy Type Theory has been introduced as a context for doing synthetic homotopy theory. In 10, we show that a slight generalization of Homotopy Type Theory, called Interval Type Theory, allows to define a model structure on the universe of all types, which, through the model interpretation, corresponds to defining a model structure on the category of cubical sets. This work generalizes previous works of Gambino, Garner and Lumsdaine from the universe of fibrant types to the universe of all types. Our definition of Interval Type Theory comes from the work of Orton and Pitts to define a syntactic approximation of the internal language of the category of cubical sets. We extend the work of Orton and Pitts by introducing the notion of degenerate fibrancy, which allows to define a fibrant replacement, at the heart of the model structure on the universe of all types. All our definitions and propositions have been formalized using the Coq proof assistant.
An alternative to working with model structures is to pursue the idea of pushing synthetic Homotopy Theory further, so as to deal with higher coherences directly inside Type Theory. In 25
we show that, by extending univalent type theory with a universe of definitionally associative and unital polynomial monads, we arrive at a coinductive definition of opetopic type which is able to encode a number of fully coherent algebraic structures. In particular, our approach leads to a definition of
In 21 we give two different results. First, we provide a purely syntactic presheaf model of CIC. Contrarily to similar endeavours, this variant both preserves conversion and interprets full dependent elimination. Then, using a particular instance of this model, we show how to extend CIC with Markov’s principle, while preserving all good meta-theoretical properties like canonicity and decidability of type-checking. The resulting construction can be seen as a synthetic presentation of Coquand-Hofmann’s syntactic model of PRA
The MetaCoq project 14 aims to provide a certified meta-programming environment in Coq. It builds on Template-Coq, a plugin for Coq originally implemented by Malecha (2014), which provided a reifier for Coq terms and global declarations, as represented in the Coq kernel, as well as a denotation command. Recently, it was used in the CertiCoq certified compiler project (Anand et al., 2017), as its front-end language, to derive parametricity properties (Anand and Morrisett, 2018). However, the syntax lacked semantics, be it typing semantics or operational semantics, which should reflect, as formal specifications in Coq, the semantics of Coq's type theory itself. The tool was also rather bare bones, providing only rudimentary quoting and unquoting commands. We generalize it to handle the entire Polymorphic Calculus of Cumulative Inductive Constructions (pCUIC), as implemented by Coq, including the kernel's declaration structures for definitions and inductives, and implement a monad for general manipulation of Coq's logical environment. We demonstrate how this setup allows Coq users to define many kinds of general purpose plugins, whose correctness can be readily proved in the system itself, and that can be run efficiently after extraction. We give a few examples of implemented plugins, including a parametricity translation and a certifying extraction to call-by-value λ-calculus. We also advocate the use of MetaCoq as a foundation for higher-level tools.
Coq is built around a well-delimited kernel that perfoms typechecking for definitions in a variant of the Calculus of Inductive Constructions (CIC). Although the metatheory of CIC is very stable and reliable, the correctness of its implementation in Coq is less clear. Indeed, implementing an efficient type checker for CIC is a rather complex task, and many parts of the code rely on implicit invariants which can easily be broken by further evolution of the code. Therefore, on average, one critical bug has been found every year in Coq. 15 presents the first implementation of a type checker for the kernel of Coq (without the module system and template polymorphism), which is proven correct in Coq with respect to its formal specification and axiomatisation of part of its metatheory. Note that because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, there is no hope to prove completely the correctness of the specification of Coq inside Coq (in particular strong normalisation or canonicity), but it is possible to prove the correctness of the implementation assuming the correctness of the specification, thus moving from a trusted code base (TCB) to a trusted theory base (TTB) paradigm. Our work is based on the MetaCoq project which provides metaprogramming facilities to work with terms and declarations at the level of this kernel. Our type checker is based on the specification of the typing relation of the Polymorphic, Cumulative Calculus of Inductive Constructions (pCUIC) at the basis of Coq and the verification of a relatively efficient and sound type-checker for it. In addition to the kernel implementation, an essential feature of Coq is the so-called extraction: the production of executable code in functional languages from Coq definitions. We present a verified version of this subtle type-and-proof erasure step, therefore enabling the verified extraction of a safe type-checker for Coq.
Dependently typed programming languages and proof assistants such as Agda and Coq rely on computation to automatically simplify expressions during type checking. To overcome the lack of certain programming primitives or logical principles in those systems, it is common to appeal to axioms to postulate their existence. However, one can only postulate the bare existence of an axiom, not its computational behaviour. Instead, users are forced to postulate equality proofs and appeal to them explicitly to simplify expressions, making axioms dramatically more complicated to work with than built-in primitives. On the other hand, the equality reflection rule from extensional type theory solves these problems by collapsing computation and equality, at the cost of having no practical type checking algorithm. In 11, we introduce Rewriting Type Theory (RTT), a type theory where it is possible to add computational assumptions in the form of rewrite rules. Rewrite rules go beyond the computational capabilities of intensional type theory, but in contrast to extensional type theory, they are applied automatically so type checking does not require input from the user. To ensure type soundness of RTT-as well as effective type checking-we provide a framework where confluence of user-defined rewrite rules can be checked modularly and automatically, and where adding new rewrite rules is guaranteed to preserve subject reduction. The properties of RTT have been formally verified using the MetaCoq framework and an implementation of rewrite rules is already available in the Agda proof assistant.
Homotopy type theory is an extension of type theory that enables synthetic reasoning about spaces and homotopy theory. This has led to elegant computer formalizations of multiple classical results from homotopy theory. However, many proofs are still surprisingly complicated to formalize. One reason for this is the axiomatic treatment of univalence and higher inductive types which complicates synthetic reasoning as many intermediate steps, that could hold simply by computation, require explicit arguments. Cubical type theory offers a solution to this in the form of a new type theory with native support for both univalence and higher inductive types. In 20, we show how the recent cubical extension of Agda can be used to formalize some of the major results of homotopy type theory in a direct and elegant manner.
In 17, we discuss the design of a hierarchy of structures which combine linear algebra with concepts related to limits, like topology and norms, in dependent type theory. This hierarchy is the backbone of a new library of formalized classical analysis, for the Coq proof assistant. It extends the Mathematical Components library, geared towards algebra, with topics in analysis. Issues of a more general nature related to the inheritance of poorer structures from richer ones arise due to this combination. We present and discuss a solution, coined forgetful inheritance, based on packed classes and unification hints.
The team received part of the Nomadic-Labs grant OCaml-Evolution (Coordinator and Inria contact: Gabriel scherer) for G. Munch-Maccagnoni's continued work on the OCaml compiler.
G. Munch-Maccagnoni acted as an expert for Nomadic Labs on OCaml-Rust bindings.