sorbet VS tapioca

...which goes beyond static typing into declaring explicitly what something needs to support to be used by the method. Granted this is more complicated than it sounds and has a number of drawbacks, as you can see in this discussion.

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).

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)