Dart: Optional Typing, Mirrors and More

With Gilad Bracha (http://bracha.org/Site/Bio.html)

In this talk, we'll examine optional types (http://bracha.org/pluggableTypesPosition.pdf) and mirrors (http://bracha.org/mirrors.pdf) in Dart (http://www.dartlang.org/) and elsewhere. We'll start some pre-history, demoing the Strongtalk (http://www.strongtalk.org/) system whose optional types were the pre-cursor to Dart's. Then we'll discuss the current state of Dart's typechecking (http://www.dartlang.org/articles/optional-types/). Next, we'll review mirror-based reflection and examine several variant APIs: Strongtalk, Newspeak (http://newspeaklanguage.org/) and Dart.