[DougBTX]

Julia strikes a nice middle ground. Functions which don't specify the types of their arguments are implicitly generic, and are JIT compiled when called based on what the actual argument types are. So even if a function doesn't have types specified, if it is called with arguments with incorrect types, then there will be a compile error at a level further down if there's no implementation available for nested function calls.

The error messages are not as nice as if the types were specified at the top level, but there's usually still enough static type checking to know whether the code will run or not before it runs, which is one of the big benefits of static type checking. The other benefit of static types is performance due to compile time optimisations, which Julia can benefit from if the functions are type-stable.

[skohan]

Sounds like an interesting approach. I'm actually working on a language as a hobby, I've been experimenting with implicit generics and it takes you pretty far.

Do you have type constraints for generic arguments in Julia? I.e. when you're looking at the signature, does it ensure that the operations performed on values inside are going to work?

[eigenspace]

You can put arbitrary type-level restrictions on any argument in a function's signature. You can also interleave runtime with compile time to restrict things based on value. Julia's type system is fully parametric and allows values in the parameters.

If I write

    f(x :: Number) = x + 1
    f(x :: String) = x * x
    f(x :: Int)    = x - 1

this defines 3 separate methods for the function f. The Int method is actually more specific than the Number method because Int <: Number, so we get the following behaviour:

    julia> f(1.0)
    2.0

    julia> f("hi ")
    "hi hi "

    julia> f(2)
    1

Regarding this part of your question

> when you're looking at the signature, does it ensure that the operations performed on values inside are going to work?

I guess the answer depends on what you mean. Julia's interfaces are somewhat implicit, and we do not do ahead of time checks by default, so if I define my own type that is a subtype of Number, but that type does not have methods for addition, then f will error on that type.

However, the static checking package JET.jl will easily detect that this will happen statically at compile time.