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Transient Typechecks Are (Almost) Free

Authors Richard Roberts , Stefan Marr , Michael Homer , James Noble

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Author Details

Richard Roberts
  • School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Stefan Marr
  • School of Computing, University of Kent, UK
Michael Homer
  • School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
James Noble
  • School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Funding

This work is supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund.

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Richard Roberts, Stefan Marr, Michael Homer, and James Noble. Transient Typechecks Are (Almost) Free. In 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 134, pp. 5:1-5:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.5

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.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Just-in-time compilers
  • Software and its engineering → Object oriented languages
  • Software and its engineering → Interpreters
Keywords
  • dynamic type checking
  • gradual types
  • optional types
  • Grace
  • Moth
  • object-oriented programming

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