Paper on gradual typing by Éric Tánter receives recognition at the Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) - Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data

October, 2023. The Most Notable The 19th Dynamic Language Symposium's "Most Notable Paper Award" recognizes the most influential the most influential research paper, with 10 years of perspective, and this year's featured paper isand this year's featured paper is "Cast Insertion Strategies for Gradually-Typed Objects." (2013), by Esteban Allende, Johan Fabry y Éric Tanterall, at that time, from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile, and the and the Pleiad Laboratory.

The gradual typing (Gradual Typing) allows a smooth and progressive integration of dynamic and static programming languages.This paper explores the micro- and macro-scale costs of various strategies that seek to protect gradual typing in an object-oriented programming language, examining how these different strategies affect typed, untyped, and both typed and untyped code components.

The 19th Symposium on Dynamic Languages (DLS) is one of the conferences of ACM SIGPLANwhich focuses on the discussion of dynamically typed languages, their implementation and application. DLS provides a space for researchers and those working on practical applications to meet and share their knowledge, experiences and ideas for future research and development in the area.

Éric Tánter, a researcher at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Dataemphasizes that "gradual typing 10 years ago was something quite newwith important theoretical advances but few implementations in but with few implementations in real programming languages.. The doctoral thesis of Esteban Allende focused on implementing gradual typing for the Smalltalk language. While working on this implementationimplementation, we realized several challenges to implement gradual typing in object-oriented languages, and this paper presents an analysis of these problems, and several possible solutions.and this paper presents an analysis of these problems, and several possible solutions".

At DLSthey highlight it as a seminal contribution to the understanding of the performance and performance of gradual typing. gradual typing, which since that date, has become an important area of research. "All strategies used in gradually typed languages today, can trace their lineage to the strategies described and proposed in this paperespecially, the proposed hybrid approach has been adapted numerous times by many systems.systems, giving this work a long-lasting impact that transcends its original scope.", they emphasize in the acknowledgement.

In later years, several papers focused on how to implement gradual typing. gradual typingand the efficiency problems it can bring, and other challenges. Also, several languages with gradual typing began to be proposed from the industry, so this award comes to recognize the impact this work had on those later efforts.This award recognizes the impact that this work had on these later efforts, according to the symposium.

To Éric Tánterin the study of dynamically typed languages, gradual typing is a very important line. "But it is not the only one: the line of how to optimize the implementation of dynamic languages, and how to evolve them for emerging contexts (cloud programming, AI, etc.) is still very active."

Static and dynamic and gradual

Programming languages can be divided into two main groups: statically typed, in which type checking is performed at complication time (such as Java, C++, Scala, OCaml, among others). (such as Java, C++, Scala, OCaml, among others)and dynamically typed languages, in which the type checking is performed at runtime (such as JavaScript, Python, Python, Python, and so on). (such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc.).).

Both families have dual (dis)advantages: static typing ensures early error detection and allows certain optimizations, but provides some complexity and imposes conservative constraints, while dynamic typing is more flexible and simple, but is more costly in general, and leaves error reporting to the execution of the program itself.

The gradual typing or gradual typing is just one way to combine the strengths of each language family, and as a witness to the interest of this line, many dynamic languages now have optional/gradual type systems (TypeScript for JavaScript, Python 3 and its type hints, Hack for PHP, Sorbet for Ruby, etc.).