Simple unification-based type inference for GADTs

Abstract

Generalized algebraic data (GADTs), sometimes known as guarded recursive data types or first-class phantom are a simple but powerful generalization of the data of Haskell and ML. Recent works have given compelling examples of the utility of GADTs, although type inference is known to be difficult. Our contribution is to show how to exploit programmer-supplied type annotations to make the type inference task almost embarrassingly easy. Our main technical innovation is wobbly types, which express in a declarative way the uncertainty caused by the incremental nature of typical type-inference algorithms.