Abstract

This paper presents novel techniques for checking the soundness of a type system automatically using a software model checker. Our idea is to systematically generate every type correct intermediate program state (within some finite bounds), execute the program one step forward if possible using its small step operational semantics, and then check that the resulting intermediate program state is also type correct–but do so efficiently by detecting similarities in this search space and pruning away large portions of the search space. Thus, given only a specification of type correctness and the small step operational semantics for a language, our system automatically checks type soundness by checking that the progress and preservation theorems hold for the language (albeit for program states of at most some finite size). Our preliminary experimental results on several languages–including a language of integer and boolean expressions, a simple imperative programming language, an object-oriented language which is a subset of Java, and a language with ownership types–indicate that our approach is feasible and that our search space pruning techniques do indeed significantly reduce what is otherwise an extremely large search space. Our paper thus makes contributions both in the area of checking soundness of type systems, and in the area of reducing the state space of a software model checker.