Is sound gradual typing dead?

Programmers have come to embrace dynamically-typed languages for prototyping and delivering large and complex systems. When it comes to maintaining and evolving these systems, the lack of explicit static typing becomes a bottleneck. In response, researchers have explored the idea of gradually-typed programming languages which allow the incremental addition of type annotations to software written in one of these untyped languages. Some of these new, hybrid languages insert run-time checks at the boundary between typed and untyped code to establish type soundness for the overall system. With sound gradual typing, programmers can rely on the language implementation to provide meaningful error messages when type invariants are violated. While most research on sound gradual typing remains theoretical, the few emerging implementations suffer from performance overheads due to these checks. None of the publications on this topic comes with a comprehensive performance evaluation. Worse, a few ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Asumu Takikawa, Daniel Feltey, Ben Greenman, Max S. New, Jan Vitek, Matthias Felleisen
• Keywords: POPL 2016, Programming Languages