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How OCaml type checker works -- or what polymorphism and garbage collection have in common | okmij.org | original February 2013 | updated January 9, 2022 (okmij.org)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There is more to Hindley-Milner type inference than the Algorithm W. In 1988, Didier Rémy was looking to speed up the type inference in Caml and discovered an elegant method of type generalization. Not only it is fast, avoiding scanning the type environment. It smoothly extends to catching of locally-declared types about to escape, to type-checking of universals and existentials, and even to MLF.

Alas, both the algorithm and its implementation in the OCaml type checker are little known and little documented. This page is to explain and popularize Rémy's algorithm, and to decipher a part of the OCaml type checker. The page also aims to preserve the history of Rémy's algorithm.

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