I don’t know if it is an overstatement or not but several companies have already switched from Elixir because of lack of static typing. In the video you’ve linked above, Jose states that it is an elephant in the room (important topic in other words) and dashbitco has already been paid to implement type checking in the compiler (and that’s why it is present there).
So, language is already moving towards compile time type inference, there are research groups working in set-theoretic type inference analysis, there is me, there is facebook with eqwalizer, etc. And I think that setting up language and compiler specification process is a good step in this direction, which would make a process of compiler development more coordinated and define the compatibility boundaries of compilers and runtime capabilities.
That’s not the conclusion. And even if this is the conclusion, I can argue about points like “static typing won’t improve performance”, because I already have an existing compiler which is capable to perform compile time optimizations based on very-very-very basic type inference in Enum pipelines, and I have drafts of compile-time protocol resolution.
The problem is that, while these optimizations are compatible with reference compiler in 99.999999999% of cases and really useful, some non-obvious use cases will be broken (like using Patch library to check if function was called). So specification is required to define what is a reliable behavior and what is not and may vary from version to version, or from compiler to compiler
