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0 pointstonyg8y ago0 comments

Yep. You can, of course, make a similar argument for Scheme. But you don't get a very interesting type system out of it.

Perhaps I should have written "... nontrivially statically typed."

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naasking8y ago

Sure, but to bring it back to the original question, the fact that you can trivially distinguish floating point from word types already means statically typed languages are easier to optimize than dynamically typed languages for numerical programs.

And there are all sorts of optimizations like this that simply aren't available to dynamically typed languages. Tracing JIT can only take you so far.

tonygOP8y ago

OK, but that wasn't the original question.

(There are also all sorts of optimizations that can't be done statically, so I guess there's that.)

naasking8y ago

The original question asked whether static typing is needed when maximal performance is required. If we understand "maximal" to mean literally, "no more performance can possibly be squeezed out", then it simply is. Static typing might not be sufficient for this case, but it is necessary.

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0 pointstonyg8y ago0 comments

Yep. You can, of course, make a similar argument for Scheme. But you don't get a very interesting type system out of it.

Perhaps I should have written "... nontrivially statically typed."

0 comments

naasking8y ago

And there are all sorts of optimizations like this that simply aren't available to dynamically typed languages. Tracing JIT can only take you so far.

tonygOP8y ago

OK, but that wasn't the original question.

(There are also all sorts of optimizations that can't be done statically, so I guess there's that.)

naasking8y ago

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