The author claims that by removing some type inference (lambdas and generic instantiation) you can reduce the amount of code required to implement type-checking.

  • John@mastodon.social
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    10 months ago

    @armchair_progamer no mention of (mutual) recursion? It’s been a while since I worked on my type checker, but I thought that you needed to separate inference into unification variable generation and constraint solving so that you don’t fall into an infinite loop (each function asking the other functions type - forever).

    • armchair_progamerOPM
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      10 months ago

      You probably need to annotate recursive function return values. I know in some languages like Swift and Kotlin, at least in some cases this is required; and other languages have you annotate every function’s return value (or at least, every function which isn’t a lambda expression). So IMO it’s not even as much of a drawback as the other two.