Decidable Subtyping of Existential Types for Julia

Abstract

Julia is a modern scientific-computing language that relies on multiple dispatch to implement generic libraries. While the language does not have a static type system, method declarations are decorated with expressive type annotations to determine when they are applicable. To find applicable methods, the implementation uses subtyping at run-time. We show that Julia's subtyping is undecidable, and we propose a restriction on types to recover decidability by stratifying types into method signatures over value types---where the former can freely use bounded existential types but the latter are restricted to use-site variance. A corpus analysis suggests that nearly all Julia programs written in practice already conform to this restriction.