[Grace-core] Should Grace abandon "gradual typing" for "like typing"?

[Vitek, Jan]

Concrete types are fun because they give you performance but that only matters if you really care about execution speed. And if you have a VM that can take advantage of it.

We were running an untyped language (Thorn) on top of a typed VM (the JVM), concrete types was a way to regain Java-level performance for an otherwise untyped language.


Jan Vitek, Professor 
Computer Science, 
Northeastern University

> On Jul 27, 2016, at 4:05 PM, James Noble <kjx at ecs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
> 
> On 28/07/2016, at 1:46AM, Andrew P. Black <black at cs.pdx.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> Can you summarize the changes that you are proposing to the current Grace semantics?
> 
> I think I'm not proposing any changes to the "current" Grace semantics.
> 
> I think I'm proposing that we don't investigate any of the more fancy sound, blame-carrying, etc gradual typing proposals and rather just stick with the
> existing semantcs --- and point people to Thorn if anyone complains. 
> 
> Declare victory and move on, in other words - in particular to seeing how we can ensure adding more types doesn't make a program slower.
> 
> If we wanted to go the whole hog we could add in their "concrete" types too,
> but I don't think we *have* to do that. 
> 
> James