[username223]

> Unreliable optimizations and performance-critical software

This is why we will not have, and should not want, a "sufficiently smart compiler," but instead a "sufficiently predictable compiler." If the compiler is an enormously complex inference system, then tiny language-level changes can result in huge performance changes (see "space leaks" in Haskell, or "auto-vectorization" in basically anything). The solution isn't adding more knobs to the compiler; it's adding easier inter-language communication. Scripting languages like Matlab, Perl, Python, and R have been doing this right for decades: make a good effort at a specific domain (math, text, statistics), and make it easy to call into lower-level code for the key pieces.

[codygman]

Space leaks are a bad example imo since they happen in other languages as well.

[Tyr42]

Yeah, but having a chain of functions failing to fuse properly can be quite surprising.

[codygman]

There seemed to be an implication that Hindley Milner type inference leads to unpredictable performance, you can see that is untrue with ml and ocaml.