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In theoretical extreme, you're correct. Even with a dynamically typed language like Scheme, if you do the whole program analysis you can eliminate most of run-time type checking, boxing/unboxing and some transient allocations (e.g. Stalin). The problem is that the cost of whole program analysis is superlinear and it'll doomed to be impractical as the size of program grows, imho.

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Even whole program analyzing compilers can't necessarily outperform a well-tuned regular compiler, see e.g. MLTon vs OCaml in this (micro-) benchmark. The OCaml compiler is just well-written and well-tuned and performs surprisingly well.

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/languages/ray_tracer/performanc...

But then as always, this benchmark may just test an implementation detail (afair OCaml is unboxing floats or float arrays (?) or maybe some of the MLTon standard lib is really slow). I seem to remember other benchmarks mirroring these results though.

Interesting report. Thanks. Does MLTon recompile including standard lib? (Stalin does---it recompiles and inlines all std lib functions used from the program every time, which is why it takes so long to compile.)

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