Suggestion: introduce something like a @inferable or @typestable macro to the language

[aramirezreyes]

Take a look at:

@StefanKarpinski

That’s an idea, but the “even if supercompile took 3 days” part isn’t hypothetical, it’s actually an underestimate of how long it would take to compile every possible specialization. The number of possible specializations of f(a::A, b::B) is N(A) * N(B) where N(T) denotes the number of concrete implementations of T. The number of specializations of f(a::A, b::B, c::C) is N(A) * N(B) * N(C). And so on—it’s exponential in the number of arguments and multilinear in the number of concrete implementations of every argument type. Worse still, it is trivial to write a parametric type which has an infinite number of concrete implementations, meaning that the number of possible specializations of f would be infinite. So when I said underestimate above I meant that supercompilation would never stop.

So you cannot possibly compile for all the types that can be passed to you functions, even if they are inferrable. To compile for a specific set of concrete types you can use StaticCompiler.jl. Yes, the tooling for what Jeremy Howard mentions is not there yet. But it is not because of this.

This talk by Tim Holy talks about the current state in some of those matters.