DAdavidatbu·Mar 30, 2022
I spent about two weeks trying to use Sorbet while working on a rails codebase. For context, I'm a huge typing fan, and use it even when writing 10 line scripts in Python. Here were my feelings:
The TLDR for me is: I’d still be willing to keep using sorbet, if issue number 4 below (that the LSP isn’t very responsive) would be fixed. Otherwise, it adds more work than it removes from my workflow, so I've stopped trying it out.
Start with the negatives:
1. It’s a lot of grunt work to set it up properly in an application like ours with many dependencies. Specifically, sorbet and/or related tooling tries to generate RBI (equivalent of typescript’s index.d.ts) files by actually importing and running your code, and doing introspection on the types of the arguments of functions. I managed to work around this problem, but it’s a reflection of how
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young Ruby typing is as a whole that this step was a time-sink for me.
2. There’s no mechanism to do the equivalent of yarn add -D @types/react-table (which would install typings for the react-table package). You basically have to copy paste from this github repo[0] manually.
3. Some really popular gems still don’t have types. For example, IIRC, devise’s typings are either non-existent or are uselessly incomplete.
4. The sorbet LSP isn’t very responsive, at least in neovim. I asked @jez about this just now, so hopefully I'll get a response.
5. Super verbose syntax.
Positives:
1. Thanks to this repo[1], there’s actually a way to easily generate typings that would cover a lot of the dynamism of rails, it works quite well.
2. It’s legit helped me catch errors with my code.
[0] https://github.com/sorbet/sorbet-typed
[1] https://github.com/chanzuckerberg/sorbet-rails