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Like others have stated in the thread, Crystal is a different language that shares some its syntax with Ruby. Our aim is to keep our Ruby codebase but adopt static types gradually.

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Is there any runtime performance gain to be had in the interpreter at runtime when adding types. I understand the benefits to your workflow but is there an opportunity to allow the interpreter to do less work when types are used?

Currently, no. On the contrary, since Sorbet syntax is pure Ruby, it needs a runtime component, so there is actually a small negative impact in performance at runtime. The reason why we cannot use types to make the interpreter do optimizations is because the interpreter is not aware of types.

Having said that, such optimizations are indeed possible and we are already thinking about how we can use the type information we have to that effect. There are still many things that need to line up for that to be a thing, so we are not expecting any new developments on this soon. But this is a very exciting direction for our Ruby Infrastructure team at Shopify.

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