Transient Typechecks Are (Almost) Free Richard Roberts School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
[email protected] Stefan Marr School of Computing, University of Kent, UK
[email protected] Michael Homer School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
[email protected] James Noble School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
[email protected] Abstract Transient gradual typing imposes run-time type tests that typically cause a linear slowdown. This performance impact discourages the use of type annotations because adding types to a program makes the program slower. A virtual machine can employ standard just-in-time optimizations to reduce the overhead of transient checks to near zero. These optimizations can give gradually-typed languages performance comparable to state-of-the-art dynamic languages, so programmers can add types to their code without affecting their programs’ performance. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Software and its engineering → Just-in-time compilers; Software and its engineering → Object oriented languages; Software and its engineering → Interpreters Keywords and phrases dynamic type checking, gradual types, optional types, Grace, Moth, object- oriented programming Digital Object Identifier 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.5 Funding This work is supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund. 1 Introduction “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a dynamic language in possession of a good user base, must be in want of a type system.” with apologies to Jane Austen. Dynamic languages are increasingly prominent in the software industry.