IDE support to facilitate the transition from rapid prototyping to robust software production
Francisco Ortín, Antón Morant · 2011
Dynamic languages are becoming increasingly popular for different software development scenarios such as rapid prototyping because of the flexibility and agile interactive development they offer. The benefits of dynamic languages are, however, counteracted by many limitations produced by the lack of static typing. In order to obtain the benefits of both approaches, some programming languages offer a hybrid dynamic and static type system. The existing IDEs for these hybrid typing languages do not provide any type-based feature when dynamic typing is used, lacking important IDE facilities offered for statically typed code. We have implemented a constraint-based type inference system that gathers type information of dynamic references at compile time. Using this type information, we have extended a professional IDE to offer those type-based features missed for dynamically typed code. Following the Separation of Concerns principle, the IDE has also been customized to facilitate the conversion of dynamically typed code into statically typed one, and vice versa.