steep VS sorbet

I saw no mention of RBS+Steep, the latter providing a LSP. I use it a lot and very much like it, although it's still young and needs love, but it's making good, steady progress! I've been very pleasantly surprised by some of the crazy things Steep can catch, completely statically!

You appear to be working on projects with Sorbet (which I tried to like but found it fell short in practice, notably outside of the app use case i.e it's mostly useless for gems) so it may be a tall order to try on those. Maybe you can give RBS+Steep a shot on some small project?

RBS: https://github.com/ruby/rbs

RBS collection (for those gems that don't ship RBS signatures in `sig`, integrates with bundler): https://github.com/ruby/gem_rbs_collection

Steep: https://github.com/soutaro/steep

VS Code: https://github.com/soutaro/steep-vscode

Sublime Text: https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP

Vim (I'm working on it): https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/pull/4671

1. Lack of LSP: Since this new type check solution is quite new (at the time of writing), we don't have nice editor support via LSP. Things like steep will probably solve this in the future, but it's not a reliable solution now. On the other hand, Sorbet has existed for many years on the market and already provides a lot of tools for code intelligence, you can see more in this blog post.

https://github.com/soutaro/steep Also a type checker. This one uses rbs files. Not sure what subset of LSP features it supports either.

What type-checkers can use RBS? I find steep? Any others? Does anyone have a sense of how much use RBS is getting (and compared to Sorbet?) in the wild?

rbs collection feature integrates this repository and tools use RBS, such as rbs command, Steep, and TypeProf.

steep also can be run as a langserver, which is then used in the vscode plugin for type checking.

Once you have those in place, you use a tool called Steep, which is the official type checker "blessed" by the Ruby core team. Steep evaluates your code against your signature files and provides a printout of all the errors and warnings (similar to any other type checker, TypeScript and beyond).

soutaro / steep

If you're looking for static typing a dynamic language is going to be a poor fit. I find a place for both. I love Rust, but trying to write a tool that consumed a GraphQL API with was a brutal exercise in frustation. I'd say that goes for typing of JSON or YAML or whatever structured format in general. It's refreshing being able to just work with data in the form I already know it's in. Ruby can be an incredibly productive language to work with.

If you're looking for static analysis in general, please note that there are mature tools available. Rubocop¹ is probably the most popular and allows for linting and code formatting. Brakeman² is a vulnerability scanner for Rails. Sorbet³ is a static type checker.

The tooling is there if you want to try things out. But, if you want a statically typed language then that's a debate that's been going since the dawn of programming language design. I doubt it's going to get resolved in this thread.

¹ - https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop

² - https://brakemanscanner.org/

³ - https://sorbet.org/

Context: Sorbet is also the name of a popular Ruby type checker[1], built by Stripe.

[1]: https://sorbet.org

Sorbet, implemented in C++, is a Ruby gem designed to harmonize the dynamism of Ruby with the reliability and predictability of static typing. As Ruby projects scale in size and complexity, maintaining code quality and preventing errors becomes increasingly challenging. A primary culprit is the absence of static typing, which often necessitates heavy reliance on extensive testing and runtime checks to ensure code correctness, resulting in more frequent bugs slipping into production.

...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.