Efficient Counter-factual Type Error Debugging

Abstract

Type inference is an important part of functional programming languages and has been increasingly adopted to imperative programming. However, providing effective error messages in response to type inference failures (due to type errors in programs) continues to be a challenge. Type error messages generated by compilers and existing error debugging approaches often point to bogus error locations or lack sufficient information for removing the type error, making error debugging ineffective. Counter-factual typing (CFT) addressed this problem by generating comprehensive error messages with each message includes a rich set of information. However, CFT has a large response time, making it too slow for interactive use. In particular, our recent study shows that programmers usually have to go through multiple iterations of updating and recompiling programs to remove a type error. Interestingly, our study also reveals that program updates are minor in each iteration during type error debugging. We exploit this fact and develop eCFT, an efficient version of CFT, which doesn't recompute all error fixes from scratch for each updated program but only recomputes error fixes that are changed in response to the update. Our key observation is that minor program changes lead to minor error suggestion changes. eCFT is based on principal typing, a typing scheme more amenable to reuse previous typing results. We have evaluated our approach and found it is about 12.4× faster than CFT in updating error fixes.