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Tricky thing there is that the VM would still need to do checks at all the boundary points, including all of the language-level and runtime-level APIs. At what point along such a migration would it become net faster?

It'd need a ton of buy-in from the whole community and all VM implementors to have a chance at pencilling out in any reasonable time span. Not saying I'm against it, just noting.

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Agreed, but I do think all major libraries would be rewritten in any soundly typed version of JS pretty quickly, especially if it was faster (assuming that is the case).

>runtime-level APIs

like the Document APIs?

> like the Document APIs?

Yeah, the DOM in the browser, node APIs in nodejs, etc.

> especially if it was faster

Well, that's the thing. Initially it'll be slower, 'cause the code you call, and that calls you will be mostly unsound.

Unless you can run the sound code without the soundness checks at boundaries, at which point it becomes harder to reason about, and you'll be tempted to add some additional runtime checks to your code that the type system should catch.

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