natalie VS sorbet

Since I tried Sorbet, a Ruby type-checker, the idea of building an ahead-of-time compiler for Ruby is a cool side project that has been in my mind for some time now. To my surprise, during Hacktoberfest, I got to know Natalie, this AOT compiler written in C++ by Tim Morgan.

Unlike other languages, ruby is mainly driven by one application - Rails. As newer web FWs come, it's hard to see Rails keep up. The trends for Rails does not look good for the past 5 years [1]. I am hopeful that natalie [2] will work. If it does, it will remove the biggest downside to ruby.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

[2] https://github.com/natalie-lang/natalie

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