elaboration-zoo

Minimal implementations for dependent type checking and elaboration

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Minimal implementations for dependent type checking and elaboration

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solomon-b/lambda-calculus-hs · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

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Observed mentions: 2022-09-13 05:57:01 UTC to 2026-10-10 03:43:49 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

5 sources

solomonb·Oct 10, 2026

And if you want to see worked examples elaboration of dependent types then the `elaboration-zoo` is a great thing to look at: https://github.com/AndrasKovacs/elaboration-zoo I've also got an incomplete project that aims to present a more expanded set of implementations then the elaboration zoo: https://github.com/solomon-b/lambda-calculus-hs

In What mathematicians should know about the Lean Theorem Prover: reliability & AI

etiamz·Aug 18, 2025

In Typechecker Zoo

dunham·Jul 29, 2024

If anyone is interested in how this works, I've found András Kovács' "Elaboration Zoo" to be a good tutorial: https://github.com/AndrasKovacs/elaboration-zoo It incrementally covers normalization by evaluation, bidirectional typechecking, basic pattern unification, implicit insertion (which relies on unification), and then more sophisticated variants on pattern unification.

In Higher-kinded bounded polymorphism in OCaml (2021)

solomonb·Jun 14, 2023

I've noticed amongst many peers that when going down the type theory/pl theory journey there is a ton of hidden knowledge and context we all find ourselves collecting which makes all it "click" and help produce more idiomatic implementations. All of this knowledge and context spread amongst a common set of books, papers, blog posts, and git repos floating around the internet. At the risk of creating yet another partial silo, I decided earlier this year to create a project similar to the [Elaboration Zoo](https://github.com/AndrasKovacs/elaboration-zoo) but focused on a blessed path to MLTT with a number of the desirable language features via bidirectional typechecking. https://github.com/solomon-b/lambda-calculus-hs The project is incomplete and my end goal is a website like the [1 Lab](https://1lab.dev) but focused on Type Theory and PL

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Theory, but I ran low on steam and could use some collaborators.

In How to implement dependent type theory I (2012)

bjz_·Sep 13, 2022

I think it's more a reflection of how Rust evolved, and the techniques and approaches known and understood at the time and the strangeness budget they were (understandably) willing to take on at the time as opposed to something inherent. And also sometimes having separate, complicated features for similar things (as opposed to simple, generalised features that compose powerfully) can be useful pedagogically as well. At any rate, this is something I'm personally interested in based on my experience working with Rust over the last decade, and so that's why it appears so high up on my list. Often you really do want sub-languages for different purposes, but managing how they interact and work together, what is the same and what is different, and how that impacts usability is interesting (and difficult) part. I feel like it should be possible

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to do this, but it's going to take some work and there's still lots of unknowns. In technical terms, I'm interested in dependently typed module systems, multistage programming[1], graded modal type theory[2], elaborator reflection, and two level type theory[3]. These all sound pretty intimidating, but you can actually see glimmers of some of this stuff in how Zig handles type parameters and modules, for example, something that most programmers really like the first time they see it! I do feel like there is the core of a simple, flexible, powerful systems language out there... but finding it, and making it approachable while maintaining a solid footing in the theory and being sensitive to the practical demands of systems programming is a nontrivial task, and many people will be understandably skeptical that this is even a good direction to pursue. Thankfully the barrier to entry for programming language designers to implementing languages in this style has reduced significantly in just the last number of years[4], so I have hope that we might see some interesting stuff in the coming decade or so. In the meantime we have Rust as well, which is still an excellent language. I'm just one of those people who's never content with the status quo, always wishing we can push the state of the art further. This is why I got excited by Rust in the first place! :) [1]: https://github.com/metaocaml/metaocaml-bibliography [2]: https://granule-project.github.io/ [3]: https://github.com/AndrasKovacs/staged [4]: https://github.com/AndrasKovacs/elaboration-zoo/

In A personal list of Rust grievances