Has anyone explored the potential for these hints to be a front-end to Cython, or provide optimizations in CPython/PyPy? Static typing has big perf benefits too right, is that included in the eventual goals?
One particular point is Python subclasses: it makes a lot of sense to say that a Python subclass is a subtype of the parent class, but in reality there are no guarantees about any relationship. This means that a compiler/VM would most likely have a hard time making use of type annotations since it would have to have to support the user passing arbitrary subclasses with completely different behavior.