Longer-term, there's definitely some interest in how we could leverage types to support more optimized code, but it's been a notoriously difficult problem for gradually-typed languages in general, see [Is sound gradual typing dead?](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2837614.2837630)
> primary interest in building the type system is in supporting a better developer experience
Yeah this is the right reason to do it :-)
> there's definitely some interest in how we could leverage types to support more optimized code, but it's been a notoriously difficult problem for gradually-typed languages in general
I know. I still get folks asking why TypeScript types can't be used to make JS fast and it's quite exhausting to explain this.
Hard to imagine gradual types beating what you get from the combo of PICs, speculative JITing, and static analysis.
(I worked on JavaScriptCore's optimizer, hence why I'm curious about where y'all are coming from on this)
If performance, are you comparing against a baseline that does the classic Self-style optimizations (like what JS engines do)?
FWIW I don't consider LuaJIT to be an interesting baseline because of what I've heard about it being overtuned to specific benchmark that the author(s) care about. (Too much of an attitude where if your code doesn't run well then it's your fault.)