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it seems like the clean syntax makes the type checker's life harder and so performance is unacceptable. would you rather have clean syntax or acceptable compile times?

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I want both! I strongly believe the computer should relieve the user of all the obvious, tedious, boring tasks. That includes figuring out types, if they can be figured out by inspecting the code. Obviously this isn't an easy problem to solve efficiently, but I think it's worth optimizing this heavily, instead of just giving up and forcing the developer to write "dumb" annotations.

Edit: I'm no expert in this topic, but Prolog interpreters (compilers?) have some fascinating machinery to solve complex constraints. Maybe a similar approach could help here?

Trait instantiation in most languages is already using a Prolog-like approach.

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