As we look to the future and what we would like for Dylan to become and investigate how we would like for Dylan to evolve, it is helpful to look at some of the current work and how Dylan compares, where Dylan falls down and whether or not we can improve it.

One of those areas is in the guarantees offered by the type system. While Dylan is seen as a dynamic language, it has a number of features that help provide optional static type checking. As we'll see, there is a lot of room for improvement in this area.

In this post, using a missing compile-time warning as the driver, we'll walk through some details of the Dylan type system and then see how it differs from a gradually typed system. We'll see that type annotations are interpreted very differently under a gradual typing regime versus the Open Dylan compiler.

I've previously written a Type System Overview which may be useful, but hopefully this post can stand on its own.

One particularly interesting body of work is that on Gradual Typing. From What is Gradual Typing:

Gradual typing is a type system I [Jeremy Siek] developed with Walid Taha in 2006 that allows parts of a program to be dynamically typed and other parts to be statically typed. The programmer controls which parts are which by either leaving out type annotations or by adding them in.

On the surface, this sounds a lot like how the Dylan type system operates. Type annotations can be provided or inferred, and are optional. When the Dylan compiler has sufficient type information, it can perform many sorts of optimizations, many of which are key to getting good run-time performance. The compiler can also use this type information to provide better warnings and diagnostics for the Dylan programmer.

The Case of the Missing Warning So, how do they differ? Let's start by taking an interesting case that happened to me the other day! I accidentally wrote this bit of code: write ( string-data , stream ); Unfortunately, this very simple bit of code compiled with no warnings, yet was fatally flawed. It should have been this, with the arguments in the correct order: write ( stream , string-data ); So, why didn't the compiler generate a warning? In this case, the Dylan compiler knew that stream was a <stream> instance and that string-data was a <string> . It also knew that the method write was defined as follows: define open generic write ( stream :: <stream> , elements :: <sequence> , #key start , \end ) => (); To get any further, we're going to have take a trip into the compiler source code.

Diving into the Depths of the Compiler We'd been hoping to see a warning that started with the text Invalid type for argument . With some quick greps, we can see that this corresponds to the <argument-type-mismatch-in-call> warning object which is emitted from check-call-compatibility defined in sources/dfmc/optimization/dispatch.dylan . For the purposes of this post, it isn't too important to know how we got to this point in the compiler, but the short form is that we're analyzing function call sites to try to optimize them and we check them first for various issues, which eventually gets to check-call-compatibility . The relevant bit of code, with a few things that don't matter here removed is: for ( arg-te in arg-te* , required-type in required-types , i :: <integer> from 0 below required-count ) if ( ~guaranteed-joint? ( arg-te , required-type )) if ( effectively-disjoint? ( arg-te , required-type )) let required-specs = spec-argument-required-variable-specs ( signature-spec ( f )); note ( <argument-type-mismatch-in-call> , source-location: dfm-source-location ( call ), context-id: dfm-context-id ( call ), function: f , required-type: required-type , supplied-type-estimate: arg-te , arg: spec-variable-name ( required-specs [ i ])); end if ; end if ; end for ; Here, arg-te* is a sequence of "type estimates" for each of the arguments at the call-site. A type estimate is the data about the type of a value that the compiler knows, including also information about where that data came from or how it was inferred. required-types is the sequence of types that the function being called requires. It should also be noted that this check is only to emit the warning. This part of the code plays no role in optimization. Upgrading the call-site to remove or reduce the run-time dispatch and the associated decision making is handled in another part of the optimizer. Into the Type System The first check is to see if the type estimate and the required type for the argument is not guaranteed-joint? . (In Dylan, a ~ is the negation operator.) The guaranteed-joint? check is simply a way of checking whether or not one type or type estimate is known to be a subtype of the second type or type estimate. In this case, the compiler knows that <string> and <stream> are not joint ( <string> is not a subtype of <stream> ). In some type systems, this would be an immediate compile-time failure. But in a dynamic type system, we have a couple of options, and this is the point at which Dylan diverges from being Gradually Typed. In a Gradually Typed type system, I believe that the proper behavior at this point would be to see if type annotations had been provided for the value, and if it had, then this would be a compile time failure. If not, then we're in a part of the program where we are leaving these sorts of failures to run-time. From What is Gradual Typing again: The gradual type checker deals with unannotated variables by giving them the unknown type (also called the dynamic type in the literature), which we abbreviate as ? and by allowing implicit conversions from any type to ? and also from ? to any other type. For simplicity, suppose the + operator expects its arguments to be integers. The following version of add1 is accepted by the gradual type checker because we allow an implicit conversion from ? (the type of x ) to int (the type expected by + ). def add1 ( x ): return x + 1 In Dylan, however, things are very different. We can see that we call effectively-disjoint? here and only emit the warning when that has returned a true value. In digging into the type system implementation, not all code will be shown. Only the code related to the types of values involved here (class vs class) comparisons will be shown. effectively-disjoint? does a couple of bits of work related to false-or type unions in Dylan, and then hands the work off to guaranteed-disjoint? . This soon ends up in a call to classes-guaranteed-disjoint? . When Are Two Classes Disjoint? We are now at an interesting philosophical question: When are two classes disjoint? When are they guaranteed to be disjoint? The answer to this is that it isn't as easy as it seems. A new class could be available that the compiler isn't aware of while compiling this call-site and the code would be valid at run-time even though it didn't appear to be at compile-time. Given two classes, c1 and c2 , if any subclass of c1 is also a subclass of c2 , then they're provably not disjoint. This may cause you to scream in horror. Perhaps rightfully so, but that's the nature of this beast. So, when does the Open Dylan compiler consider two classes to be disjoint? First, neither class can be a subtype of the other. This is pretty logical. Next, any of these conditions must be true for it to be guaranteed disjoint: If both of the classes have superclasses which are primary and those primary superclasses are not in a subtype relationship, then the classes are provably disjoint.

The DRM defines that "... two classes which specify a slot with the same getter or setter generic function are disjoint...".

Since we've gotten this far, we know that the two classes may be disjoint. To be sure that they are, we can check that there is no common subclass now and that things are sealed so that a new common subclass can't be created in the future. This is a very different model from that which is provided by Gradual Typing. The gradually typed model produces a compile-time failure when both arguments have type information available sufficient to demonstrate the disjointedness of the argument's type estimate and the argument's required type. A <string> is not a <stream> and so it can not be passed as an argument where a <stream> is required. The Dylan model is significantly more dynamic: it is clear that a <string> is not a <stream> , but since it is possible there could be a future <stream> which also inherits from <string> , then the compiler assumes that such a thing may actually happen. No warning is emitted and the dispatch is left as a fully dynamic (run-time) dispatch. A shorter summary would be that in a gradually typed system, the type annotation for a value indicates the most that the compiler should assume about it, while in the Dylan type system, it represents the bare minimum that can be known about it, unless otherwise limited (via primary classes, sealing, or slot definitions).