[LLVMdev] Advice on CFG pre-analysis

[Hendrik Boom]

On Tue, 27 May 2008 21:19:24 -0700, Talin wrote:

> 
> The overall motivation for this, BTW, is my attempt to prove a personal
> theory, which is that most static type systems are guarding against the
> wrong things. Type mismatch errors don't keep programmers up at night;
> null pointers, deadlocks and race conditions do. So my language tries to
> check for null pointer errors at compile time using static types.

The reason type-mismatch errors don't keep programmers up at night is 
that the compiler catches them statically.  In the old days, when 
compilers didn't catch all these errors (I think of using pointer 
variables in PL/1) programmers did stay up all night over type mismatches.

So it isn't that the static type systems are guarding against the wrong 
errors -- it's that they aren't guarding against enough of them.

-- hendrik