[Haskell-cafe] Apparently, Erlang does not have a static type system, since with hot code loading, this is intrinsically difficult.

wren ng thornton wren at freegeek.org
Mon Apr 5 05:44:33 EDT 2010


Jason Dusek wrote:
> 2010/04/03 Casey Hawthorne <caseyh at istar.ca>:
>> Apparently, Erlang does not have a static type system, since with hot
>> code loading, this is intrinsically difficult.
> 
>   It is doubtless hard to statically check a program that is
>   not statically available :)

Well, so long as you get the hot-loaded component all at once, you can 
do analysis on the static code before you try running it. Just because 
some code arrives after the program started running doesn't mean that 
code needs to be interpreted and have dynamic safety checks inserted.

Now, if you don't get your code in nice cohesive chunks, but have it 
streaming in all willy nilly, then you'd need something like gradual 
typing or what Epigram does in order to do partial-analysis of what 
static code is available, even if it has holes in it.

-- 
Live well,
~wren


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list