The "type" type dream

[bearophile]

Robert Fraser:
> For an example, take a look at ShedSkin

I have given a hand developing ShedSkin with Mark, and I am helping its development now too :-)
I agree it may not be able to scale to medium or large programs, currently it can handle programs of about 3000-5000 lines. But note that:
- it's written in Python, so using a faster language (like Java or D) it can become significantly faster (but writing it in Java or D may require lot of work, despite it's only few thousands or lines of code).
- Mark has not used a lot of tricks that if used can speed up the code more. The code was not even profiled.
- ShedSkin used a pure approach: it uses no type signatures at all, given by the programmer. But I was not suggesting to use a full type inferencing in D. This means that in a more realistic system you add several type signatures, and this will speed the algorithm a lot.
- There's also the trick of progressive compilation. If integrated into the editor such type inferencing can digest the program in smaller bites, making the actual compilation faster. This is of course not easy to do, but it's possible. Note that something similar also allows you to create an IDE for dynamic languages that has capabilities similar to the IDEs for static languages.

Scala is an example of OO language that also has some type inferencing.


> (if you're still reading this sorry

Sorry for what?

Bye,
bearophile