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Linear effects, exceptions, and resource safety: a Curry-Howard correspondence for destructors

arXiv:2510.2351765.9h-index: 19
AI Analysis

This work provides a foundational theoretical framework for integrating exceptions with linear resource management, relevant to programming language designers working on safe systems languages like Rust.

The authors develop a Curry-Howard correspondence for destructors, combining linearity, effects, and exceptions in programming language models. They introduce the allocation monad and two calculi (linear call-by-push-value and resource call-by-push-value) to prove resource-safety properties, showing that destructors enable affine types with ordered derivations for safe resource release.

We analyse the problem of combining linearity, effects, and exceptions, in abstract models of programming languages, as the issue of providing some kind of strength for a monad $T(- \oplus E)$ in a linear setting. We consider in particular for $T$ the allocation monad, which we introduce to model and study resource-safety properties. We apply these results to a series of two linear effectful calculi for which we establish their resource-safety properties. The first calculus is a linear (optionally ordered) call-by-push-value language with two allocation effects $\mathbf{new}$ and $\mathbf{delete}$. The resource-safety properties follow from the linear and ordered character of the typing rules. We then integrate exceptions with linearity and effects by adjoining default destruction actions to types, as inspired by C++/Rust destructors. We see destructors as objects $δ: A\rightarrow TI$ in the slice category over $TI$. This construction gives rise to a second calculus, the resource call-by-push-value, featuring exceptions and destructors, and whose weakening and exchange rules perform side-effects. It is therefore affine at the level of types but ordered at the level of derivations. As in C++ and Rust, a ``move'' operation -- the side-effecting exchange rule -- is necessary for releasing resources in random order, as opposed to LIFO order.

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