How Profilers Can Help Navigate Type Migration

Explore a groundbreaking 18-minute conference talk from OOPSLA2 2023 that delves into the use of profilers for navigating type migration in software development. Learn how Ben Greenman, Matthias Felleisen, and Christos Dimoulas investigate the challenges of sound migratory typing and propose innovative solutions to performance regressions. Discover the results of an extensive experiment involving tens of thousands of performance-debugging scenarios and seventeen strategies for translating profiler output into actionable steps. Gain insights into the most effective strategy of using deep types to eliminate costly boundaries between typed and untyped components, which succeeds in over 50% of scenarios. Explore the implications of this research for rational programmers seeking to refactor untyped code bases to typed ones safely and efficiently.