Type-based allocation analysis for co-recursion in lazy functional languages

Abstract

This paper presents a novel type-and-effect analysis for pre-dicting upper-bounds on memory allocation costs for co-recursive def-initions in a simple lazily-evaluated functional language. We show thesoundness of this system against an instrumented variant of Launch-bury’s semantics for lazy evaluation which serves as a formal cost model.Our soundness proof requires an intermediate semantics employing indi-rections. Our proof of correspondence between these semantics that weprovide is thus a crucial part of this work.The analysis has been implemented as an automatic inference system.We demonstrate its effectiveness using several example programs thatpreviously could not be automatically analysed.