Regarding this paper recently featured on Reddit, I got to thinking.
Perhaps it’s best to add type information starting in high-level modules; intuitively, having a low-level leaf function (especially one that is frequently called) checking and re-checking its type arguments on every call would certainly be slower than a higher-level function that gets called only a few times throughout the course of a run.
For instance, for a program that does data processing, added type checks in “once per file” functions would have less effect on the execution time than type checks in “once per line” functions.
But maybe we’re missing something, here. The paper adds complete type information to one module at a time, but does nothing about inter-module calls at each step. That is, a module may define that it accepts a string argument, but callers in other modules won’t be declaring that they are passing strings until that module has types added.
PHP & Perl Web Development, and the Craft of Programming
