Why didn't Jikes take off?

Posted Mar 17, 2005 2:17 UTC (Thu) by clumens (subscriber, #28542) [Link]

Static typing increases code bloat drastically, which prevents you from being able to find as many bugs, let along even have as much time to write the software in the first place.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. What exactly about static typing leads to code bloat? The best I can figure is that you believe static typing does not allow the level of code reuse that dynamic typing does - for example, the C-style generic code is pretty bad about this. However, static/dynamic and polymorphic/monomorphic are two different axes. You can have statically typed but still polymorphic code. For example, the Hindley-Milner type inference system used by Standard ML/NJ is checked entirely at compile time, yet allows for incredible code reuse. And, it catches all your type errors. Under this sort of environment with strong strict typing and where types are so important, even a large number of your logic errors are caught at compile time.

Perhaps there is something else you were thinking of? Too bad I responded to this so late, but I was skimming through the previous week's issue and just felt compelled to write a reply.