blog-static/content/blog/10_compiler_polymorphism.md

title	date	tags	draft
Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 10 - Polymorphism	2020-02-29T20:09:37-08:00	C and C++ Functional Languages Compilers	true

[In part 8]({{< relref "08_compiler_llvm.md" >}}), we wrote some pretty interesting programs in our little language. We successfully expressed arithmetic and recursion. But there's one thing that we cannot express in our language without further changes: an if statement.

Suppose we didn't want to add a special if/else expression into our language. Thanks to lazy evaluation, we can express it using a function:

defn if c t e = {
    case c of {
        True -> { t }
        False -> { e }
    }
}

But an issue still remains: so far, our compiler remains monomorphic. That is, a particular function can only have one possible type for each one of its arguments. With our current setup, something like this {{< sidenote "right" "if-note" "would not work:" >}} In a polymorphically typed language, the inner if would just evaluate to False, and the whole expression to 3. {{< /sidenote >}}

if (if True False True) 11 3

This is because, for this to work, both of the following would need to hold (borrowing some of our notation from the [typechecking]({{< relref "03_compiler_typechecking.md" >}}) post):

\\text{if} : \\text{Int} \\rightarrow \\text{Int}

\\text{if} : \\text{Bool} \\rightarrow \\text{Bool}

But using our rules so far, such a thing is impossible, since there is no way for \(\text{Int}\) to be unified with \(\text{Bool}\). We need a more powerful set of rules to describe our program's types. One such set of rules is the Hindley-Milner type system, which we have previously alluded to. In fact, the rules we came up with were already very close to Hindley-Milner, with the exception of two: generalization and instantiation. It's been quite a while since the last time we worked on typechecking, so I'm going to present a table with these new rules, as well as all of the ones that we previously used. I will also give a quick summary of each of these rules.

Rule	Name and Description

\\frac{x:\\sigma \\in \\Gamma}{\\Gamma \\vdash x:\\sigma}

\\frac{\\Gamma \\vdash e\_1 : \\tau\_1 \\rightarrow \\tau\_2 \\quad \\Gamma \\vdash e\_2 : \\tau\_1}{\\Gamma \\vdash e\_1 \\; e\_2 : \\tau\_2}

\\frac{\\Gamma, x:\\tau \\vdash e : \\tau'}{\\Gamma \\vdash \\lambda x.e : \\tau \\rightarrow \\tau'}

\\frac{\\Gamma \\vdash e : \\tau \\quad \\text{matcht}(\\tau, p\_i) = b\_i \\quad \\Gamma,b\_i \\vdash e\_i : \\tau\_c}{\\Gamma \\vdash \\text{case} \\; e \\; \\text{of} \\; \\\{ (p\_1,e\_1) \\ldots (p\_n, e\_n) \\\} : \\tau\_c }

\\frac{\\Gamma \\vdash e : \\sigma \\quad \\sigma' \\sqsubseteq \\sigma}{\\Gamma \\vdash e : \\sigma'}

\\frac{\\Gamma \\vdash e : \\sigma \\quad \\alpha \\not \\in \\text{free}(\\Gamma)}{\\Gamma \\vdash e : \\forall a . \\sigma}