eqwalizer VS otp

I don't think the implementation itself is at fault, but yes, I do think that the design of dialyzer makes it an (at times) faulty type checker. The unfortunate reality of a type checker that fails sometimes is that it makes it mostly useless because you can never trust that it'll do the job.

To be clear, I've had it fail in a function where I've literally specced that very function to return a `binary` but I'm returning an `integer` in one of the cases. This is a very shallow context but it can still fail. Now add more functions, maybe one more `case`.

I think an entire rethink of type checking on the BEAM had to be done and that's why eqWalizer[0] was created and why Elixir is looking to add an actual sound, well-developed type checker. Gleam[1] I would assume is just a Hindley-Milner system so that's completely solid. `purerl`[2] is just PureScript for the BEAM so that's also Hindley-Milner, meaning it's solid. `purerl` has some performance issues caused by it compiling down to closures everywhere but if you can pay that cost it's actually pretty fantastic. With that said my bet for the best statically typed experience right now on the BEAM would be `gleam`.

0 - https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer

1 - https://gleam.run

2 - https://github.com/purerl/purerl

While it's not static-typing, compile-time type checking for Erlang have come a long way: Eqwalizer works pretty well - but I may be biased since my employer sponsors the project.

1. https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer

Note there is also research happening in this area by the Elixir team. The WhatsApp is also working on static types for Erlang, which I am certain will be available for Elixir too at some point.

From the discord blog posts it seems that elixir powers the chat system, with rust and python as the other two main languages in their stack.

As for whatsapp, they are mainly a erlang shop and yesterday they open sourced a type checker for erlang:

https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer

Theoretically, you could install any version that appears in https://github.com/erlang/otp/releases. Since it is compiled and installed from source, the installation process will take some time. When you see the following message, the installation is complete.

I’m on MacOS and erlang.org, elixir-lang.org, and postgresql.org all suggest installation via Homebrew, which is a very popular package manager for MacOS.

You can read my original report and subsequent PRs in Erlang/OTP here: https://github.com/erlang/otp/issues/5811

- a massive speedup of a common static analyzer for Erlang (https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/5997)

Funny that you should mention Erlang. Looking at the Github for Erlang, it appears that the source for Erlang is 16.8% written in C. I would bet these are not the least important bits of the whole thing. So, Erlang depends on C.

It looks more like some of the JIT improvements made it profitable to manually unroll some loops in the base64 module: https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/a03cf1601605dee767cd9d5...

https://github.com/erlang/otp as far as I know. It's somewhat confusing and I honestly couldn't say exactly where the BEAM VM or OTP or ERTS (Erlang Runtime System) start and end. I've never dug into it. I just install Elixir and sometimes Erlang through the ASDF tool, which does all the compiling for me.