[Review] Typed closure conversion preserves observational equivalence
Overall merit - 4. Accept
Reviewer expertise - 2. Some familiarity
Paper summary
The paper presents a method to prove fully abstract compilation for languages with existential types and recursive types. In particular, the authors showed that the typed closure conversion from System F to TAL is fully abstract, that is, it both reserves and reflects observational equivalence. The proofs are based on a step-index logical relation.
Comments for author
The paper is pretty well written. Definitions, lemmas and theorems with detailed proofs are presented clearly. I am intimidated by the number of symbols so I skimmed most part of the paper. I am kind of lost when they talk about recursive types. I think it would be helpful in the introduction to show some code examples in System F to demonstrate observational equivalence (like what the Securing the .NET Programming Model paper does).