Incrementalizing Statix

Incrementalizing Statix: A Modular and Incremental Approach for Type Checking and Name Binding using Scope Graphs

Aerts, Taico (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science; TU Delft Programming Languages)

van Antwerpen, Hendrik (mentor)
Visser, Eelco (mentor)
Yorke-Smith, Neil (graduation committee)
Krebbers, Robbert (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Computer Science

2019-09-26

Statix is a language which generates a type checker from a declarative specification. However, Statix is not fast enough for quick feedback in IDEs because it always has to reanalyze all files. In this thesis, we improve the analysis time of Statix by applying the ideas of separate compilation to create a model for incremental analysis. Statix uses a scope graph for representing the scoping and declarations of a project. We split the scope graph over multiple smaller modules which can be analyzed in isolation. Our model automatically detects dependencies between modules and supports creating scope graph diffs to determine modules affected by changes with high precision. The modules from our model can be solved in parallel, already yielding performance improvements of up to 40% compared to the original implementation. Finally, we implement an optimistic strategy with our model and show that it is effective whenever changes are small, reducing analysis time by up to 5 times for large projects.

Statix
Incremental
Type checking
Modularization
Name binding
Spoofax

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3e0ea516-3058-4b8c-bfb6-5e846c4bd982

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Taico Aerts