If you start off treating ATS like an ML variant interfacing with C without using any of the type annotations for safety you can go far. Then you can tighten th

If you start off treating ATS like an ML variant interfacing with C without using any of the type annotations for safety you can go far. Then you can tighten the types up for safety as you get more experienced or find you need it. You could write tests as needed and when a test fails write types that make that failure as close to compile time as possible. Another approach is to just write C code, either embedded in ATS files or in C files that are linked into ATS. Then slowly convert C to ATS as you feel comfortable.