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Challenges and progress toward efficient gradual typing (invited talk)

Published:24 October 2017Publication History
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Abstract

Mixing static and dynamic type checking in the same language is catching on, with the TypeScript and Flow variants of JavaScript, the MyPy and Reticulated variants of Python, the Strongtalk and Gradualtalk variants of Smalltalk, as well as Typed Racket, Typed Clojure, and Perl 6. The gradual typing approach to such mixing seeks to protect the statically typed code from the dynamically typed code, allowing compilers to leverage type information when optimizing the static code. Unfortunately, ensuring soundness requires runtime checking at the boundaries of typed and untyped code, and the cost of this checking can drown out the performance benefits of optimization. For example, in Typed Racket, some partially typed programs are 1000X slower than the untyped or fully typed version of the same program. But all is not lost! In this talk I present the results of ongoing research to tame the runtime overheads of gradual typing in the context of a prototype compiler, named Grift, that we are developing at Indiana University.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
        ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 52, Issue 11
        DLS '17
        November 2017
        86 pages
        ISSN:0362-1340
        EISSN:1558-1160
        DOI:10.1145/3170472
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          DLS 2017: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on on Dynamic Languages
          October 2017
          86 pages
          ISBN:9781450355261
          DOI:10.1145/3133841

        Copyright © 2017 Owner/Author

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 24 October 2017

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