[PRL] Benjamin Pierce: Types Considered Harmful

[Mitchell Wand]

It was my impression that the GC/performance comment was a joke.  --Mitch

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 11:51 AM, Felix S Klock II <pnkfelix at ccs.neu.edu>
wrote:

>
> On May 30, 2008, at 10:15 AM, Dave Herman wrote:
>
>  The weirdest part was when he claimed that one of the big issues people
>> have with type systems is performance. Does anyone actually say this?
>>
>
> Most type systems (of which I am aware) require a memory safe language for
> their soundness proof to go through.  Many languages rely on GC to get
> memory safety.  People have argued against (tracing) Garbage Collection
> based on performance.
>
> So I think that is the heart of the argument there, which can be summarized
> as: "if you reject GC due to its performance implications, then you might as
> well throw out the goal of type safety as well."
>
> I do not know how many people actually make this argument to conclude that
> you should reject types; it requires a pretty deep knowledge of type systems
> and a somewhat shallow knowledge of GC.
>
> The argument does require that you accept *every* implication on the title
> of slide 19.
>
> (I reject a majority of the implications on the title of slide 19.)
>
> -Felix
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed