EAGER: Reconceiving Scripting Language Design

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Scripting languages such as Python, Javascript, and Ruby have carved out an important niche: rapid development of solutions to small and medium sized problems. Unfortunately, scripting languages today also have significant shortcomings: type errors arise only at runtime, making it harder to isolate bugs; there are no declared type interfaces, forcing libraries to use informally-described interfaces; and runtime performance is poor compared to statically-typed languages. The main cause of these problems is the lack of a static type system.This project is preliminary work on a new scripting language that addresses this problem by developing a statically-typed scripting language from scratch, aiming to retain the flexibility of existing scripting languages while also solving the fundamental problems of difficult debugging and poor runtime performance. The PI's approach is based on subtype constraint type inference algorithms, which are very flexible and do not require type declarations.