Interesting - I wasn't really thinking about the code generation end of things, just the correctness-checking end. I find it amusing, actually, that while the kind of optimizations that one could do are often cited as benefits of the Static Way, very few compilers seem to actually do them :-)

[Though dynamic/duck-typed languages could also be a lot faster (http://www.avibryant.com/2006/09/ruby-and-strong.html), apparently.]