Type Inference

[mvcisback]

Annotate the Syntax Tree with types (this will be probabilistic in the general case, so we should support annotating multiple types for a given symbol)

[mvcisback]

• http://pubs.doc.ic.ac.uk/chrisandersonphd/chrisandersonphd.pdf
• http://pubs.doc.ic.ac.uk/typeinferenceforjavascript-ecoop/typeinferenceforjavascript-ecoop.pdf
• esprima does type inference
• http://rfrn.org/~shu/drafts/ti.pdf
• ion monkey is the successor to brian hackett's TI
• http://www.jswebtools.org/strobe/
• http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/livshits/papers/pdf/fse13.pdf
• http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~boyland/fool2012/papers/fool2012_submission_5.pdf

[mvcisback]

Maybe we should consider handing this off to a http://ternjs.net/ server. The algorithm doesn't appear to be as sophisticated as CFA2 in doctorjs, but its actively maintained.

Relevant blog post: http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/tern.html

[erikrose]

And now we're using it in Firefox's new WebIDE, so we'd have mutual question-asking ability with the Dev Tools team. jlongster on IRC might be a good one to ask what he thinks of ternjs, or at least he'd know who knows.

[mvcisback]

Here's a test branch https://github.com/mvcisback/spiderflunky/tree/tern that uses ternjs to infer the types.