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The biggest feature I want out of Starlark the language (not Bazel the build system) is to allow optional type annotations. They don’t have to do anything, they don’t have to specified, it just needs to be syntactically valid to put type annotations somewhere. If there were syntax for type annotations that tools like Bazel ignored, it would be possible for some enterprising soul who’s forced to use Bazel at work to throw up an initial prototype of a type checker and a language server for Starlark in Bazel. The language is not that complicated that a type checker couldn’t be written by a hobbiest.
My biggest frustration when using Bazel is not even Bazel—it’s the fact that when I’m looking at code like this[1], everything comes from a single, unannotated `rctx` variable that has no type annotation. So when I’m trying to read the code, it’s a matter of constantly grepping the repo, grepping the bazel docs, and grepping the bazel source code to get any new code written.
Why can’t I just hover and see the docs? Why can’t I press `rctx.` and see all the attributes available?
[1] https://github.com/bazel-contrib/toolchains_llvm/blob/master...
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clace
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[4] https://github.com/claceio/apps/blob/main/utils/bookmarks/ap...
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starlark-rust (used by Buck2) supports this! They're immensely useful for grokking complex build code, as you said. https://github.com/facebook/starlark-rust/blob/main/docs/typ...
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Having done some nontrivial Bazel/Starlark hacking, I completely agree that lightweight static types would be a good usability improvement. But I want to point out that Starlark is actually not Turing complete, which is imo one of the more interesting characteristics it has. Recursion is forbidden (https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark/blob/master/spec.md#f...) and loops must be structural; there is no while loop or other unbounded iteration construct. Starlark is one of the more capable and mainstream non-Turing-complete languages out there, and doesn't resemble the other common ones which mostly show up in theorem provers. On the one hand I think the logic in a build system that needs to reason about incremental builds absolutely should be guaranteed to terminate, but in some particularly painful situations I've had to resort to iteration over smart-contract-style "gas" parameters.
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SaaSHub
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