>
> Why for performance?  One of the cool things about animorphic was that 
> the type annotations were completely ignored by the JIT, even though 
> they were available.  The runtime info, I assume, was better.

Exactly this is the all point.
Gilad said that types are bad for security and speed optimisation and 
(he is really expert in the domain, apparently they got several holes 
in Java security model because of that).
Now types are really valuable for understanding and this is really the 
idea behind **optional** **pluggable** type systems.
We can imagine that we have several different kind of annotations 
inferred by clever analyzer (type engine).

We got some private presentations with gilad but he told me that some 
of the material was in the presentation
he gave at SAC : 
http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2004/keynote_speakers.htm
but it seems that the link is dead.

Stef