undefined | Better HN

0 pointsyawaramin7y ago0 comments

I agree and believe that it's harder to maintain a dynamically-typed codebase, but Elixir has a well-thought-out gradual typing solution: typespecs ( https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/typespecs.html#basic-types ). This builds on Erlang's Dialyzer tool and is supported by editor plugins like VSCode's ElixirLS extension. In practice, you do get instant typechecking while you code, if you write down the typespecs properly.

0 comments

himaraya7y ago

Debatable in practice, given the lack of a type system that actually enforces checks -- Dialyzer's even less complete, not to mention its poor error messages.

Elchemy, Alpaca, and Gleam try bringing static typing to the BEAM, but they're still too immature, unfortunately.

yawaraminOP7y ago

Agreed, but even with the above issues, Dialyzer still gives you, let's say, more than 50% of what you'd be getting with an ML-like type system.

phtrivier7y ago

Purely anecdotal: our experience with Dialixir was rather disapointing (slow, lots of false positive, hard to express types coming from external libraries and generated code.)

Unfortunately, the tradeoff at the time made us stop using specs altogether.

yawaraminOP7y ago

Surprised to hear about false positives, that's supposed to be impossible by the design of Dialyzer (it only reports provable type errors).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsyawaramin7y ago0 comments

0 comments

himaraya7y ago

Debatable in practice, given the lack of a type system that actually enforces checks -- Dialyzer's even less complete, not to mention its poor error messages.

Elchemy, Alpaca, and Gleam try bringing static typing to the BEAM, but they're still too immature, unfortunately.

yawaraminOP7y ago

Agreed, but even with the above issues, Dialyzer still gives you, let's say, more than 50% of what you'd be getting with an ML-like type system.

phtrivier7y ago

Purely anecdotal: our experience with Dialixir was rather disapointing (slow, lots of false positive, hard to express types coming from external libraries and generated code.)

Unfortunately, the tradeoff at the time made us stop using specs altogether.

yawaraminOP7y ago

Surprised to hear about false positives, that's supposed to be impossible by the design of Dialyzer (it only reports provable type errors).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse