Crosscut

What kind of type system am I going to implement in the new prototype? The end goal is to have a static type system with full type inference. But that has proven to be impractical for the time being; so I have to start with something else and transition later. And as far as I can tell, I have the following options:

• Follow the lead of the previous few prototypes and start without a type system, making the language untyped.
• Start with a simple static type system, with explicit type annotations.
• Start with a dynamic type system.

Making the language untyped was, in some ways, a big success. It was very easy to do and enabled me to build a somewhat complete game in the language. This in turn allowed me to figure out a lot of other things. But that approach turned out to be incompatible with reliable live code updates, making it a non-starter. The choice is between static types with type annotations, or dynamic types.