[MacRuby-devel] Static Typing

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Henry Maddocks <henry.maddocks at gmail.com> wrote:
> Neither of those projects have anything to do with MacRuby and as far as I can they don't have much to do with MRI either so their impact will be academic at best. The Mirah project is trying to make ruby more like Java. Well there already is a language a lot like Java, it's called Java. If you prefer the Obj-C way of doing things then feel free to use Obj-C. Me, I like [Mac]Ruby just the way it is.

Mirah is not trying to make Ruby more like Java. It uses Ruby syntax
and its apparent features as a starting point, and maps than as
directly to the JVM's type system and libraries as possible. It is a
Ruby syntax for writing JVM code. It is not Ruby. It does not intend
to be Ruby. It does not intend to change Ruby.

People are writing and running production applications with Mirah
already, so the impact is more than academic even now.

I am certainly interested in the potential of static or gradual typing
in Ruby, but it's as much a research topic as anything. My use case
would be to eliminate dynamic dispatches when explicit target can be
determined, and to improve performance of code that does heavy numeric
algorithms by making it possible to optimize them down directly to
primitive CPU maths.

I will repeat, though: Mirah is not a statically-typed Ruby. It is a
new language that borrows Ruby's (beautiful) syntax and maps it
directly to statically-typed JVM code.

- Charlie