Practical, Pluggable Types for a Dynamic Language

Haldimann, Niklaus; Denker, Marcus; Nierstrasz, Oscar (2009). Practical, Pluggable Types for a Dynamic Language. Computer languages, systems & structures, 35(1), pp. 48-64. New York, N.Y.: Elsevier 10.1016/j.cl.2008.06.003

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Most languages fall into one of two camps: either they adopt a unique, static type system, or they abandon static type-checks for run-time checks. Pluggable types blur this division by (i) making static type systems optional, and (ii) supporting a choice of type systems for reasoning about different kinds of static properties. Dynamic languages can then benefit from static-checking without sacrificing dynamic features or committing to a unique, static type system. But the overhead of adopting pluggable types can be very high, especially if all existing code must be decorated with type annotations before any type-checking can be performed. We propose a practical and pragmatic approach to introduce pluggable type systems to dynamic languages. First of all, only annotated code is type-checked. Second, limited type inference is performed on unannotated code to reduce the number of reported errors. Finally, external annotations can be used to type third-party code. We present Typeplug, a Smalltalk implementation of our framework, and report on experience applying the framework to three different pluggable type systems.

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