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ErlT targets existing Erlang users and codebases. It builds on Erlang to provide greater support for working with large Erlang codebases. It does this by introducing static types in a way which opens the door to greater IDE integration, safer refactorings, and faster, more specific feedback from the compiler.

The main design goal of ErlT is enriching Erlang with static typing capabilities to make Erlang teams and developers more productive.

To limit the scope of the project, we are not looking at making major changes in the Erlang VM. However, we are likely going to need to make relatively smaller changes for static typing, modularity, and ergonomics.

ErlT is designed for gradual adoption/migration for existing Erlang teams and codebases, and gradual adoption of static typing discipline for the code being migrated. This implies:

Enums is a nominal alternative to tagged tuples commonly used in Erlang. Enums are a critical feature needed for the ErlT static typing model.

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