Inductive types are a fundamental abstraction mechanism in type theory and proof assistants, supporting the definition of data structures and rich specifications. Nested inductive types extend this mechanism by allowing constructors to use parametric types instantiated with the type being defined (lists or trees of the type to be defined). They are widely used in large verification projects – including CompCert, Iris, Verinum, and MetaRocq – to express complex, structured specifications. Despite this widespread use, the treatment of nested inductive types in both and is unsatisfactory. rejects many practical definitions while accepts definitions for which no usable elimination principle can be defined. Neither system provides reliable automatic generation of elimination principles. As a result, developers must define custom eliminators by hand, leading to fragility, duplication, and significant proof engineering overhead. This paper introduces a novel validity criterion for nested inductive types that guarantees that they can be elaborated into well-formed mutual inductive types. Under this criterion, the elimination principle for the original nested definition is provably equivalent to that of its elaborated mutual form. Our condition strictly generalizes Lean’s current check while ruling out exactly the problematic cases accepted in . Using this foundation, we give a systematic method for automatically generating correct elimination principles for nested inductive types, and we provide an implementation integrated into , along with an implementation plan for .

Proof assistants based on dependent type theory-such as AGDA, LEAN, and ROCQ-employ different universes to classify types, typically combining a predicative tower for computationally relevant types with a possibly impredicative universe for proof-irrelevant propositions. Several other universes with specific logical and computational principles have been explored in the literature. In general, a universe is characterized by its sort (e.g., Type, Prop, or SProp) and, in the predicative case, by its level. To improve modularity and better avoid code duplication, sort polymorphism has recently been introduced and integrated in the ROCQ prover. However, we observe that, due to its unbounded formulation, sort polymorphism is currently insufficiently expressive to abstract over valid definitions with a single polymorphic schema. Indeed, to ensure soundness of a multi-sorted type theory, the interaction between different sorts must be carefully controlled, as exemplified by the forbidden elimination of irrelevant terms to produce relevant ones. As a result, generic functions that eliminate values of inductive types from one sort to another cannot be made polymorphic; dually, polymorphic records that encapsulate attributes of different sorts cannot be defined. This lack of expressiveness also breaks the possibility to infer principal types, which is highly desirable for both metatheoretical and practical reasons. To address these issues, we extend sort polymorphism with bounds that reflect the required elimination constraints on sort variables. We present the metatheory of bounded sort polymorphism, paying particular attention to the consistency of the resulting constraint graph. We implement bounded sort polymorphism in ROCQ and illustrate its benefits through concrete examples. Bounded sort polymorphism with elimination constraints is a natural and general solution that effectively addresses current limitations and fosters the development of, and practical experimentation with, multi-sorted type theories.

In dependently typed proof assistants, users can declare axioms to extend the ambient logic locally with new principles and propositional equalities governing them. Additionally, rewrite rules have recently been proposed to allow users to extend the logic with new definitional equalities, enabling them to handle new principles with a computational behaviour. While axioms can only break consistency, the addition of arbitrary rewrite rules can break other important metatheoretical properties such as preservation of typing. In this paper, we present an implementation of rewrite rules on top of the Rocq Prover, together with two modular criteria to ensure that the added rewrite rules preserve confluence and typing. These criteria, based on the triangle property for the former and bidirectional type checking for the latter, are formally expressed for PCUIC—the type theory of Rocq recently developed in the MetaRocq project.

Certified programming, as carried out in proof assistants and dependently-typed programming languages, ensures that a software meets its requirements by supporting the definition of both specifications and proofs. However, proofs easily break with partial definitions and incremental changes because specifications are not designed to account for the intermediate incomplete states of programs. We advocate for proper support for incremental certified programming by analyzing its objectives and inherent challenges, and propose a formal framework for achieving incremental certified programming in a principled manner. The key idea is to define appropriate notions of completion refinement and completeness to capture incrementality, and to systematically produce specifications that are valid at every stage of development while preserving the intent of the original statements. We provide a prototype implementation in the Rocq Prover, called IncRease, which exploits typeclasses for automation and extensibility, and is independent of any specific mechanism used to handle incompleteness. We illustrate its use with both an incremental textbook formalization of the simply-typed λ-calculus, and a more complex case study of incremental certified programming for an existing dead-code elimination optimization pass of the CompCert project. We show that the approach is compatible with randomized property-based testing as provided by QuickChick. Finally we study how to combine incremental certified programming with deductive synthesis, using a novel incrementality-friendly adaptation of the Fiat library. This work provides theoretical and practical foundations towards systematic support for incremental certified programming, highlighting challenges and perspectives for future developments.

Proof assistants based on dependent type theory, such as Coq, Lean and Agda, use different universes to classify types, typically combining a predicative hierarchy of universes for computationally-relevant types, and an impredicative universe of proof-irrelevant propositions. In general, a universe is characterized by its sort, such as Type or Prop, and its level, in the case of a predicative sort. Recent research has also highlighted the potential of introducing more sorts in the type theory of the proof assistant as a structuring means to address the coexistence of different logical or computational principles, such as univalence, exceptions, or definitional proof irrelevance. This diversity raises concrete and subtle issues from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In particular, in order to avoid duplicating definitions to inhabit all (combinations of) universes, some sort of polymorphism is needed. Universe level polymorphism is well-known and effective to deal with hierarchies, but the handling of polymorphism between sorts is currently ad hoc and limited in all major proof assistants, hampering reuse and extensibility. This work develops sort polymorphism and its metatheory, studying in particular monomorphization, large elimination, and parametricity. We implement sort polymorphism in Coq and present examples from a new sort-polymorphic prelude of basic definitions and automation. Sort polymorphism is a natural solution that effectively addresses the limitations of current approaches and prepares the ground for future multi-sorted type theories.

CoQ is built around a well-delimited kernel that performs type checking for definitions in a variant of the Calculus of Inductive Constructions (CIC). Although the metatheory of CIC is very stable and reliable, the correctness of its implementation in CoQ is less clear. Indeed, implementing an efficient type checker for CIC is a rather complex task, and many parts of the code rely on implicit invariants which can easily be broken by further evolution of the code. Therefore, on average, one critical bug has been found every year in CoQ. This article presents the first implementation of a type checker for the kernel of CoQ (without the module system, template polymorphism and eta-conversion), which is proven sound and complete in CoQ with respect to its formal specification. Note that because of G & ouml;del's second incompleteness theorem, there is no hope to prove completely the soundness of the specification of CoQ inside CoQ (in particular strong normalization), but it is possible to prove the correctness and completeness of the implementation assuming soundness of the specification, thus moving from a trusted code base (TCB) to a trusted theory base (TTB) paradigm. Our work is based on the METACoQ project which provides meta-programming facilities to work with terms and declarations at the level of the kernel. We verify a relatively efficient type checker based on the specification of the typing relation of the Polymorphic, Cumulative Calculus of Inductive Constructions (PCUIC) at the basis of CoQ. It is worth mentioning that during the verification process, we have found a source of incompleteness in CoQ's official type checker, which has then been fixed in CoQ 8.14 thanks to our work. In addition to the kernel implementation, another essential feature of CoQ is the so-called extraction mechanism: the production of executable code in functional languages from CoQ definitions. We present a verified version of this subtle type and proof erasure step, therefore enabling the verified extraction of a safe type checker for CoQ in the future.

Gradual typing has long been advocated as a means to bridge the gap between static and dynamic typing disciplines, enabling a range of use cases such as the gradual migration of existing dynamically typed code to more statically typed code, as well as making advanced static typing disciplines more accessible. To assess whether a given gradual language can effectively support these use cases, several formal properties have been proposed, most notably the refined criteria set forth by Siek et al. One criterion asserts that the dynamic extreme of the spectrum should be expressible in the gradual language, formalized by the existence of an adequate embedding from the corresponding dynamic language. We observe that the existing dynamic embedding criterion does not capture the desirable property of being able to ascribe embedded code to a static type that it semantically satisfies, and ensure reliable interactions with other components within the gradual language. Specifically, we introduce the notion of robustness for gradual terms, meaning that when interacting with any gradual context, runtime failures that may occur ought to be caused by the context, not by the robust term itself. We then formulate the robust dynamic embedding criterion: if a dynamic component semantically satisfies a given static type, then its embedding subsequently ascribed to that static type should be a robust term. We demonstrate that robust dynamic embedding is not implied by any existing metatheoretical property from the literature, and is not upheld by various existing gradual languages. We show that robust dynamic embedding is achievable with a gradualized simply-typed language. All the results are formalized in the Rocq proof assistant. This novel criterion complements the set of criteria for gradual languages and opens several venues for further exploration, in particular for typing disciplines that enforce rich semantic properties.

In dependently typed proof assistants, users can declare axioms to extend the ambient logic locally with new principles and propositional equalities governing them. Additionally, rewrite rules have recently been proposed to allow users to extend the logic with new definitional equalities, enabling them to handle new principles with a computational behaviour. While axioms can only break consistency, the addition of arbitrary rewrite rules can break other important metatheoretical properties such as type preservation. In this paper, we present an implementation of rewrite rules on top of the Coq proof assistant, together with a modular criterion to ensure that the added rewrite rules preserve typing. This criterion, based on bidirectional type checking, is formally expressed in PCUIC - the type theory of Coq recently developed in the MetaCoq project.

Equality is at the heart of dependent type theory, as it plays a fundamental role in specifications and mathematical reasoning. The standard way to handle it in mainstream proof assistants such as Agda, Lean or Coq is based on Martin-Löf’s identity type, which comes straight out of the ’70s—its elegance and simplicity have earned it a long-standing use, despite a major discrepancy with traditional mathematical formulations: it does not satisfy any extensionality principles. Recently, the work on observational equality has regained interest as a new way to encode equality in proof assistants that support a universe of definitionally proof-irrelevant propositions; however it has yet to be integrated in any major proof assistant, because it is not fully compatible with another important feature of type theory: indexed inductive types. In this paper, we propose a systematic integration of indexed inductive types with an observational equality, and show that this integration can only be completely satisfactory if the observational equality satisfies the computational rule of Martin-Löf’s identity type. The second contribution of this paper is a formal proof that this additional computation rule, although not present in previous works on observational equality, can be integrated to the system without compromising the decidability of conversion.

One of the central claims of fame of the Coq proof assistant is extraction, i.e. the ability to obtain efficient programs in industrial programming languages such as OCaml, Haskell, or Scheme from programs written in Coq’s expressive dependent type theory. Extraction is of great practical usefulness, used crucially e.g. in the CompCert project. However, for such executables obtained by extraction, the extraction process is part of the trusted code base (TCB), as are Coq’s kernel and the compiler used to compile the extracted code. The extraction process contains intricate semantic transformation of programs that rely on subtle operational features of both the source and target language. Its code has also evolved since the last theoretical exposition in the seminal PhD thesis of Pierre Letouzey. Furthermore, while the exact correctness statements for the execution of extracted code are described clearly in academic literature, the interoperability with unverified code has never been investigated formally, and yet is used in virtually every project relying on extraction. In this paper, we describe the development of a novel extraction pipeline from Coq to OCaml, implemented and verified in Coq itself, with a clear correctness theorem and guarantees for safe interoperability. We build our work on the MetaCoq project, which aims at decreasing the TCB of Coq’s kernel by re-implementing it in Coq itself and proving it correct w.r.t. a formal specification of Coq’s type theory in Coq. Since OCaml does not have a formal specification, we make use of the project specifying the semantics of the intermediate language of the OCaml compiler. Our work fills some gaps in the literature and highlights important differences between the operational semantics of Coq programs and their extraction. In particular, we focus on the guarantees that can be provided for interoperability with unverified code, and prove that extracted programs of first-order data type are correct and can safely interoperate, whereas for higher-order programs already simple interoperations can lead to incorrect behaviour and even outright segfaults.

Indexed inductive types are essential in dependently-typed programming languages, enabling precise and expressive specifications of data structures and properties. Recognizing that programming and proving with dependent types could benefit from the smooth integration of static and dynamic checking that gradual typing offers, recent efforts have studied gradual dependent types. Gradualizing indexed inductive types however remains mostly unexplored: the standard encodings of indexed inductive types in intensional type theory, e.g., using type-level fixpoints or subset types, break in the presence of gradual features; and previous work on gradual dependent types focus on very specific instances of indexed inductive types. This paper contributes a general framework, named PUNK, specifically designed for exploring the design space of gradual indexed inductive types. PUNK is a versatile framework, enabling the exploration of the space between eager and lazy cast reduction semantics that arise from the interaction between casts and the inductive eliminator, allowing them to coexist and interoperate in a single system. Our work provides significant insights into the intersection of dependent types and gradual typing, by proposing a criteria for well-behaved gradual indexed inductive types, systematically addressing the outlined challenges of integrating these types. The contributions of this paper are a step forward in the quest for making gradual theorem proving and gradual dependently-typed programming a reality.

In dependent type theory, impredicativity is a powerful logical principle that allows the definition of propositions that quantify over arbitrarily large types, potentially resulting in self-referential propositions. Impredicativity can provide a system with increased logical strength and flexibility, but in counterpart it comes with multiple incompatibility results. In particular, Abel and Coquand showed that adding definitional uniqueness of identity proofs (UIP) to the main proof assistants that support impredicative propositions (Coq and Lean) breaks the normalization procedure, and thus the type-checking algorithm. However, it was not known whether this stems from a fundamental incompatibility between UIP and impredicativity or if a more suitable algorithm could decide type-checking for a type theory that supports both. In this paper, we design a theory that handles both UIP and impredicativity by extending the recently introduced observational type theory TTobs with an impredicative universe of definitionally proof-irrelevant types, as initially proposed in the seminal work on observational equality of Altenkirch et al. We prove decidability of conversion for the resulting system, that we call CCobs, by harnessing proof-irrelevance to avoid computing with impredicative proof terms. Additionally, we prove normalization for CCobs in plain Martin-Löf type theory, thereby showing that adding proof-irrelevant impredicativity does not increase the computational content of the theory.

We investigate gradual variations on the Calculus of Inductive Construction (CIC) for swifter prototyping with imprecise types and terms. We observe, with a no-go theorem, a crucial trade-off between graduality and the key properties of normalization and closure of universes under dependent product that CIC enjoys. Beyond this Fire Triangle of Graduality, we explore the gradualization of CIC with three different compromises, each relaxing one edge of the Fire Triangle. We develop a parametrized presentation of Gradual CIC (GCIC) that encompasses all three variations, and develop their metatheory. We first present a bidirectional elaboration of GCIC to a dependently-typed cast calculus, CastCIC, which elucidates the interrelation between typing, conversion, and the gradual guarantees. We use a syntactic model of CastCIC to inform the design of a safe, confluent reduction, and establish, when applicable, normalization. We study the static and dynamic gradual guarantees as well as the stronger notion of graduality with embedding-projection pairs formulated by New and Ahmed, using appropriate semantic model constructions. This work informs and paves the way towards the development of malleable proof assistants and dependently-typed programming languages.

Building on the recent extension of dependent type theory with a universe of definitionally proof-irrelevant types, we introduce TTobs, a new type theory based on the setoidal interpretation of dependent type theory. TTobs equips every type with an identity relation that satisfies function extensionality, propositional extensionality, and definitional uniqueness of identity proofs (UIP). Compared to other existing proposals to enrich dependent type theory with these principles, our theory features a notion of reduction that is normalizing and provides an algorithmic canonicity result, which we formally prove in Agda using the logical relation framework of Abel et al. Our paper thoroughly develops the meta-theoretical properties of TTobs, such as the decidability of the conversion and of the type checking, as well as consistency. We also explain how to extend our theory with quotient types, and we introduce a setoidal version of Swan's Id types that turn it into a proper extension of MLTT with inductive equality.

Gradualizing the Calculus of Inductive Constructions (CIC) involves dealing with subtle tensions between normalization, graduality, and conservativity with respect to CIC. Recently, GCIC has been proposed as a parametrized gradual type theory that admits three variants, each sacrificing one of these properties. For devising a gradual proof assistant based on CIC, normalization and conservativity with respect to CIC are key, but the tension with graduality needs to be addressed. Additionally, several challenges remain: (1) The presence of two wildcard terms at any type---the error and unknown terms---enables trivial proofs of any theorem, jeopardizing the use of a gradual type theory in a proof assistant; (2) Supporting general indexed inductive families, most prominently equality, is an open problem; (3) Theoretical accounts of gradual typing and graduality so far do not support handling type mismatches detected during reduction; (4) Precision and graduality are external notions not amenable to reasoning within a gradual type theory. All these issues manifest primally in CastCIC, the cast calculus used to define GCIC. In this work, we present an extension of CastCIC called GRIP. GRIP is a reasonably gradual type theory that addresses the issues above, featuring internal precision and general exception handling. By adopting a novel interpretation of the unknown term that carefully accounts for universe levels, GRIP satisfies graduality for a large and well-defined class of terms, in addition to being normalizing and a conservative extension of CIC. Internal precision supports reasoning about graduality within GRIP itself, for instance to characterize gradual exception-handling terms, and supports gradual subset types. We develop the metatheory of GRIP using a model formalized in Coq, and provide a prototype implementation of GRIP in Agda.

Dependently typed programming languages and proof assistants such as Agda and Coq rely on computation to automatically simplify expressions during type checking. To overcome the lack of certain programming primitives or logical principles in those systems, it is common to appeal to axioms to postulate their existence. However, one can only postulate the bare existence of an axiom, not its computational behaviour. Instead, users are forced to postulate equality proofs and appeal to them explicitly to simplify expressions, making axioms dramatically more complicated to work with than built-in primitives. On the other hand, the equality reflection rule from extensional type theory solves these problems by collapsing computation and equality, at the cost of having no practical type checking algorithm. This paper introduces Rewriting Type Theory (RTT), a type theory where it is possible to add computational assumptions in the form of rewrite rules. Rewrite rules go beyond the computational capabilities of intensional type theory, but in contrast to extensional type theory, they are applied automatically so type checking does not require input from the user. To ensure type soundness of RTT—as well as effective type checking—we provide a framework where confluence of user-defined rewrite rules can be checked modularly and automatically, and where adding new rewrite rules is guaranteed to preserve subject reduction. The properties of RTT have been formally verified using the MetaCoq framework and an implementation of rewrite rules is already available in the Agda proof assistant.