A Context-Oriented Programming Approach to Dependency Hell

Two or more incompatible versions of a library are sometimes needed in one software artifact, which is so-called dependency hell. One likely faces the problem if he or she uses two or more libraries that depend on the same library. In this paper, we propose versioned values to solve the problem. They allow us to have multiple versions of functions in a binary file. This gets rid of requiring two or more incompatible binaries. We develop a calculus λVL to discuss type safety in the case where definitions are available only in specific versions, which is a common and important nature of versioned programs.