sorbet-typed VS tapioca

The tooling around "installing" types for third party dependencies (the equivalent of doing "npm install @types/something" is non existent. I had to manually copy over files from https://github.com/sorbet/sorbet-typed, which is so far behind pythons and typescript, where you can just "pip install"/"npm install" the types. Not only that, most third party dependencies don't provide types, so the "coverage" is super incomplete. I had to try and create some third party types myself, bit even that was a challenge because it's so hard to be sure of the entirety of what's going on in a ruby codebase because the language is dynamic.

stdlib rbis are shipped with Sorbet. A limited selection of gem RBIs are available at https://github.com/sorbet/sorbet-typed.

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.

Have you tried https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca with Sorbet? Typing in general has ways to go sure, but I find this combination quite usable in my day to day.

Sorbet can do this, as long as you have type signatures for your code. Given Ruby's highly dynamic nature that's where tools like Tapioca come in to generate these, for example for Active Record models where instance methods are generated based on the database schema. But the moment when something returns T.untyped you're back where you were before - it helps but isn't perfect.

Regarding Sorbet and Rails, I recommend Tapioca [1].

The Rails app that I worked on had a few edge cases Tapioca didn't cover so I wrote a simple script to load the Rails app and generate RBI files (e.g. generate RBI definitions for fixture methods in ApplicationTestCase). The Tapioca codebase helped provide a path for that [2]. Tapioca also continues to add to their DSL compilers. The work to integrate Sorbet paid off very quickly.

Also, T::Enum and T::Struct are handy in any Ruby codebase.

[1] https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca

I'm pretty sure sorbet-rails is just a rails-wrapper gem for the sorbet gem :-) (HAML does exactly same thing) and tapioca seems to be some convenience library to generate RBI (https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca)