crossword-composer VS sorbet

A few wasm projects I've worked on:

- An in-browser crossword puzzle generator: https://crossword.paulbutler.org/ (source: https://github.com/paulgb/crossword-composer)

- A multi-player word game: https://redwords.paulbutler.org/

- A library for synchronizing state between clients, used for that word game: https://aper.dev/ (source: https://github.com/aper-dev/aper very WIP right now)

In my experience, the single biggest perk of using WebAssembly is that I can use a language I'm very productive in (Rust) compared to JavaScript. Everything else is secondary. That said, I think these projects have specific advantages by virtue of being WebAssembly:

- The backtracking search used for the crossword puzzle generator is carefully implemented to not allocate extra memory. This would be tough to do in JavaScript, and I believe it's partly responsible for its performance.

- The word game uses a compression algorithm that benefits very noticeably from wasm-opt, to the point that I can't run it without it. Given that wasm-opt takes a non-trivial amount of time at compile time, I suspect the JavaScript JIT would be slow at doing something similar at runtime. This is just conjecture, I haven't checked.

- What Aper does just wouldn't be possible without Rust features like Serde and macros.

Not part of the official language spec, but Ruby has Sorbet, from a company who employs Ruby core contributors and helped with the recently released JIT additions to the language, amount countless other contributions over the last couple decades.

https://sorbet.org/

First let's introduce the tool: Sorbet is a gem developed by Stripe that aims to bring type notation syntax and type checking support for the Ruby ecosystem by utilizing the "Gradual typing" philosophy, it also provide type generation from YARD comments via the tapioca gem, allowing to grow alongside the already built Ruby codebase.

We have hundreds of thousands of lines of ruby code spanning many services / monoliths. Even now I find it somewhat annoying to open a controller / component that is basically an empty class def but somehow executes a bunch of complex stuff via mixins, monkey patches etc, and you have to figure out how.

We are turning to https://sorbet.org/ to reign in the madness. I'm keen to know if others are doing the same, and how they are finding it (pros and cons)

According to https://sorbet.org/ , the vast majority of code at Stripe is written in ruby.

Caso de Stripe, que tuvo que inventar Sorbet para tener type checking en ruby.

> I guess what I'm asking is: do you see a future where there is more explicit control afforded to people who want to pick their own tradeoffs without resorting to writing everything performance-sensitive in extensions written in C/Rust/whatever?

An approach exists already in the present, and it's Stripe's Sorbet AOT compiler (https://github.com/sorbet/sorbet/tree/master/compiler).

That's incorrect. You may be thinking of Stripe, and AFAICT it's not very actively developed anymore: https://github.com/sorbet/sorbet/commits/master/compiler