II-NEW: Practical Pluggable Type Systems

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of2009 (Public Law 111-5).Buggy software costs the U.S. up to $60 billion annually, so preventingbugs is important to society. It is possible to prevent certain bugs byrunning a type-checker that analyzes a program to find all errors of agiven type. Current type-checkers for mainstream programming languages arelimited: 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 inparticular the errors that the programmer considers most important. Theoutcomes include design of new type systems for solving real-worldprogramming problems; a framework for building custom type-checkers, in thecontext of an industrial language (Java); and significant experience withreal codebases to evaluate the ideas and to generate new researchquestions. The framework will enable a community of researchers to morequickly and realistically evaluate their theories. This may encourage morerelevant research and lead to more impact on practice.