Generic Inference

Last post, I talked about Generic Types - or parameterized types or type constructors if you prefer. Things like List<T> where the type needs another type to be usable. Today, we're going to take a quick look at the companion to these, Inferred Types.

Generic Types are used during a type declaration to give you, well, a generic type. Inferred Types are used during function declaration to let you the programmer reference the type of a parameter (or part of a parameter) in the function without having to explicitly pass in the type when calling the function. Consider this basic C# function:

public void Echo<T>(T value) {
  Console.WriteLine(value);
}

When you call Echo, you don't need to specify T - it is inferred from the type of value you pass in. That's what we're talking about today for Tangent. They are slightly different from generic type parameters, so took a little work, despite having to implement a basic version of them to get the normal generic types working.

Anyways, on to the test code for the day:

foo (x: (T)) => void {
  print "in inference";
}

foo (x: int) => void {
  print "in int.";
}

entrypoint => void {
  foo "bar";
  foo 42;
}

Again, nothing fancy. All I want to see is that the compiler parses the inference properly, figures out the right overload, and generates a functional exe. As you can see/remember, the parameter declaration syntax in Tangent is (parameter-name: type-expression). This syntax is also used for generic parameters in a type declaration as I explained in the last post. It will also be used for inferred generics. 

To declare an inferred generic type, all you need to do is add the parameter declaration syntax to the parameter's type expression. So above, (T) says "please infer the type of x, and assign it to the variable T". Eventually, when the language supports constraints, it would look something like (T: constraint). This also works for inferring the parameters of generic functions - just like in C#. If you wanted to infer the T out of a List, it would look something like foo (x: List<(T)>) => void...

Now for the caveats. The first is that constraints don't actually work. The parser will grab them and resolve them to a type, but the type checker doesn't care and the code generator really doesn't care. The second is that specialization only happens at compile time. The above example correctly dispatches to the generic version and the int version respectively, but only because they are statically known. Fixing that is probably the next work. And lastly, there's a little bit of a subtle issue with how things work.

Consider this C# function:

public void Add<T>(List<T> collection, T value) { ... }

If you pass in a list of objects and an int, the compiler is smart enough to find the most common base type to use. At time of writing, Tangent doesn't have intersection types, or any similar mechanism to find that. So specifying the same generic inference type twice in the same function... will do something undefinedly bad. What you can (should be able to?) do is something like this:

add (value: T) to (collection: List<(T)>) => void { ... }
  
Here, value has no influence on the inference. The type of the List is what matters, and the type checker will verify that the value's type is (at least) that. That should be a good enough work around for the majority of cases.

Regardless, this basic functionality now works and is available in github. Next will likely be getting runtime dispatch of generic inferred functions to specific ones to work. After that I think that I'll move towards more practical realms so I can do vaguely useful things in the language. Local variable declarations and .NET interop being tops of the list.