Concrete Types for Typescript
Concrete Types for TypeScript Gregor Richards1, Francesco Zappa Nardelli2, and Jan Vitek3 1 University of Waterloo 2 Inria 3 Northeastern University Abstract TypeScript extends JavaScript with optional type annotations that are, by design, unsound and, that the TypeScript compiler discards as it emits code. This design point preserves programming idioms developers are familiar with, and allows them to leave their legacy code unchanged, while offering a measure of static error checking in annotated parts of the program. We present an alternative design for TypeScript that supports the same degree of dynamism but that also allows types to be strengthened to provide correctness guarantees. We report on an implementation, called StrongScript, that improves runtime performance of typed programs when run on a modified version of the V8 JavaScript engine. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F.3.3 Type structure Keywords and phrases Gradual typing, dynamic languages Digital Object Identifier 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2015.999 1 Introduction Perhaps surprisingly, a number of modern computer programming languages have been de- signed with intentionally unsound type systems. Unsoundness arises for pragmatic reasons, for instance, Java has a covariant array subtype rule designed to allow for a single polymor- phic sort() implementation. More recently, industrial extensions to dynamic languages, such as Hack, Dart and TypeScript, have featured optional type systems [5] geared to ac- commodate dynamic programming idioms and preserve the behavior of legacy code. Type annotations are second class citizens intended to provide machine-checked documentation, and only slightly reduce the testing burden. Unsoundness, here, means that a variable an- notated with some type T may, at runtime, hold a value of a type that is not a subtype of T due to unchecked casts, covariant subtyping, and untyped code.
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