WG211/M9KiselyovShan

Oleg Kiselyov, Chung-chieh Shan

MetaOCaml, a dialect of OCaml, is the best-developed way today to write custom code generators and assure them type-safe across multiple stages of computation. We report on the status of the ongoing MetaOCaml project, focusing on the gap between theory and practice and the difficulties that arise in a full-featured staged language rather than an idealized calculus. It is not clear, even in theory, how staging interacts with effects, polymorphism, user-defined data types, and the module system. We highlight foundational problems in type soundness and cross-stage persistence that demand investigation.