Abstract

Generic programming with recursion schemes provides a powerful abstraction for structuring recursion and provides a rigorous reasoning principle for program optimisations which have been successfully applied to compilers for functional languages. Formalising recursion schemes in a type theory offers additional termination guarantees, but it often requires compromising on performance, requiring the assumption of additional axioms, and/or introducing unsafe casts into extracted code.
This paper presents the first Rocq formalisation of hylomorphisms allowing for the mechanisation of all recognised recursive algorithms. The key contribution of this paper is that this formalisation is fully axiom-free, and it allows the extraction of safe, idiomatic functional code. We exemplify the framework by formalising a series of algorithms based on different recursive paradigms such as divide-and conquer, dynamic programming, and mutual recursion and demonstrate that the extracted functional code for the programs formalised in our framework is efficient, humanly readable, and runnable. Furthermore, we show the use of the machine-checked proofs of the laws of hylomorphisms to do program optimisations.

Cite As Get BibTex

David Castro Perez, Marco Paviotti, and Michael Vollmer. Program Optimisations via Hylomorphisms for Extraction of Executable Code. In 16th International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 352, pp. 32:1-32:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITP.2025.32

Author Details

** David Castro Perez

• University Of Kent, Canterbury, UK

** Marco Paviotti

• University Of Kent, Canterbury, UK

** Michael Vollmer

• University Of Kent, Canterbury, UK

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