Re: Optional static types for Lua - experimental derivative Ravi

[Richard Hundt <richardhundt@...>]

> Well the objectives are very different I think. I am looking to
> improve efficiency of certain operations. So the static typing is for
> that purpose. Therefore the features I intend to support will be a
> subset of above. For example, as of now I have no intention to provide
> syntactic support for classes or interfaces. Also no concept of union
> types.

Ah, okay, hence the additional ops. That's got me thinking: wouldn't
it be feasible to do run-time instruction specialization without the
need to add syntax (so you'd patch in your new ops dynamically)? If it
worked though, you could run vanilla Lua modules and perhaps get a
performance boost. Maybe that's a ton of work though without
substantial gains because recording, narrowing/widening overhead might
be too high to be beneficial. Dunno. Just an idle thought.