POPL 2026
Sun 11 - Sat 17 January 2026 Rennes, France
Thu 15 Jan 2026 14:00 - 14:25 at Nef - Proof Assistants Chair(s): Dmitriy Traytel

Convertibility checking — determining whether two lambda-terms are equal up to reductions — is a crucial component of proof assistants and dependently-typed languages. Practical implementations often use heuristics to quickly conclude that two terms are convertible, or are not convertible, without reducing them to normal form. However, these heuristics can backfire, triggering huge amounts of unnecessary computation. This paper presents a novel convertibility-checking algorithm that relies crucially on laziness and concurrency. Laziness is used to share computations, while concurrency is used to explore multiple convertibility subproblems in parallel or via fair interleaving. Unlike heuristics-based approaches, our algorithm always finds an easy solution to the convertibility problem, if one exists. The paper describes the algorithm in process calculus style, discusses its complexity, and reports on its mechanized proof of partial correctness and its lightweight experimental evaluation.

Thu 15 Jan

Displayed time zone: Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris change

14:00 - 15:40
Proof AssistantsPOPL at Nef
Chair(s): Dmitriy Traytel University of Copenhagen
14:00
25m
Talk
A Lazy, Concurrent Convertibility Checker
POPL
Nathanaëlle Courant OCamlPro, Xavier Leroy Collège de France - PSL University
DOI
14:25
25m
Talk
Canonicity for Indexed Inductive-Recursive Types
POPL
András Kovács University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology
DOI
14:50
25m
Talk
Coco: Corecursion with Compositional Heterogeneous Productivity
POPL
Jaewoo Kim Seoul National University, Yeonwoo Nam Seoul National University, Chung-Kil Hur Seoul National University
DOI
15:15
25m
Talk
Towards Pen-and-Paper-Style Equational Reasoning in Interactive Theorem Provers by Equality Saturation
POPL
Marcus Rossel Barkhausen Institut; TU Darmstadt, Rudi Schneider TU Berlin, Thomas Koehler ICube Lab - CNRS - Université de Strasbourg, Michel Steuwer TU Berlin, Andrés Goens TU Darmstadt
DOI Pre-print