Practical, Pluggable Types for a Dynamic Language

Niklaus Haldiman (1) , Marcus Denker (1) , Oscar Nierstrasz (1)

1 SCG - Software Composition Group [Bern]

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 dy- namic 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.

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Niklaus Haldiman, Marcus Denker, Oscar Nierstrasz. Practical, Pluggable Types for a Dynamic Language. Computer Languages, Systems and Structures, 2009, 35 (2), pp.48-64. ⟨10.1016/j.cl.2008.06.003⟩. ⟨inria-00555441⟩