Website | Safe, Fast and Easy: Towards Scalable Scripting Languages | Building a Typed Scripting Language
The Big Bang project aims to create a typed programming language with the feel and convenience of modern scripting languages. Projects such as DRuby and Typed Racket retrofit type systems onto existing scripting languages; unfortunately, these projects are burdened by backwards compatibility, as dynamic scripting languages are developed without regard to the static typeability of the features they include. Big Bang re-examines the design of scripting-style languages from a static typing perspective.
- No explicit typing: One primary appeal of scripting languages is that programmers need not explicitly specify types, even at module or function boundaries.
- Global type inference: The type system should not be brittle to refactorings such as method extraction.
- Performance: Using static type information, we contend that it will be possible to compile Big Bang scripts to much more efficient programs than with scripting languages such as Python or Ruby.
- Path sensitivity: Scripting programmers often use path-sensitive reasoning when confirming that a program is sound; the Big Bang type system does as well.
- No arbitrary cutoffs: Polymorphism in Big Bang does not rely on fixed cutoffs or scoping limitations; this ensures that the programmer will not be surprised by arbitrary compiler decisions.
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language
object
Last modified 03 April 2026