[erlang-questions] dialyzer and re(3)

[Richard Carlsson]

Paul Guyot wrote:
> While we appreciate dialyzer very much and we rely on it, we are  
> somewhat disappointed by its current limitations and horrible  
> slowness, especially when compared to ocaml compiler which does type  
> inference and checking faster by a magnitude...

While I'm sure that Dialyzer could be faster, it is not really
fair to compare it to the OCaml type checker - after all, they
get to tailor the problem to the algorithm, not the other way
around. Dialyzer is more in the vein of LCLint, Splint, Coverity,
etc., and needs to do a lot of work to rediscover what the
programmer probably intended. (And on top of that, Dialyzer is
implemented in Erlang, which in itself cannot really compete
with OCaml for this kind of compute-intensive tasks.)

    /Richard