Fully abstract module compilation

Abstract

We give a translation suitable for compilation of modern module calculi supporting sealing, generativity, translucent signatures, applicative functors, higher-order functors and/or first-class modules. Ours is the first module-compilation translation with a dynamic correctness theorem. The theorem states that the translation produces target terms that are contextually equivalent to the source, in an appropriate sense. A corollary of the theorem is that the translation is fully abstract. Consequently, the translation preserves all abstraction present in the source. In passing, we also show that modules are a definitional extension of the underlying core language. All of our proofs are formalized in Coq.