Re: Rather, DSSLs increase modularity, productivity

[Christopher Barber <address@hidden>]

David Farber wrote:

>At 10:50 PM 11/17/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>  
>
>>Type declarations are optional in Curl, but when you 
>>do declare them the compiler will check types statically and will 
>>generate better code based on what it knows about the type.
>>    
>>
>
>Just as another point of reference, the guys who did Animorphic Smalltalk (and then got bought out by Sun to build the HotSpot VM) have stated rather emphatically that you don't need types to get good performance--and their work certainly seems to support that view. Specifically, Self-style type collecting and method specialization basically gives you all of the "better code" benefits of static typing--but without the static typing.
>  
>
The nice thing about static-type based optimizations is that they may be 
performed with only local knowledge of the code.  When generating a 
method dispatch through a statically typed variable, you do not need to 
know anything about how the variable gets its value in order to generate 
efficient code.  This is especially important for a lazily compiled 
language, in which functions may not be compiled until they are about to 
be used.

- Christopher