Isabell Huang

Erlang/OTP Developer

Isabell is the newest team member of Erlang/OTP. She encountered Erlang in a functional programming course in Uppsala University. In Spring 2024, she did her master thesis in the OTP team about nominal types.

Talk:
Nominal Types for Erlang

Nominal typing has been used in many dynamically typed languages. User-defined types are distinguished by their names. As my master thesis at Uppsala University, I propose the addition of nominal types ‘-nominal’ in Erlang, where the changes can be applied exclusively to Dialyzer (modulo parsing). As a side effect, nominal types can encode opaque types, which improves Dialyzer’s maintainability. Nominal types will be an upcoming feature for OTP 28.

Key Takeaways:

  • Understanding how nominal types can be defined and used in Erlang.
  • Understanding how Dialyzer performs type-checking for nominal types, and the advantages of encoding opaques internally as nominal types.

Target Audience:

  • Erlang developers and enthusiasts for type systems