Comment by underdeserver 4 days ago
I think this is for the best.
I used Pytype at Google years ago and while it's well written and the team was responsive, ultimately Python is not well suited for type checking Python. It's compute intensive.
I think the Ty people at Astral have the correct idea, and hope it'll work out.
To be fair, even if there is/were a team, I don’t know that writing a new backend from scratch would be a good use of their time. pytype apparently started before mypy or any of the other Python type checkers existed. [1] But at this point there’s mypy, pyright, pyre/pyrefly, Ty, and probably more I’m not thinking of. It sounds more useful to collaborate with one of those existing projects than to write yet another new type checker.
Especially when, in my experience, each checker produces slightly different results on the same code, effectively creating its own slightly different language dialect with the associated fragmentation cost. In theory that cost could be avoided through more rigorous standardization efforts to ensure all the checkers work exactly the same way. But that would also reduce the benefit of writing a new type checker, since there would be less room to innovate or differentiate.
there is a new python team, we met up with them at pycon and had some nice conversations. as a former pytype dev I will be the first to admit that maintaining it as a legacy project without the context of having developed it over the years would not have been a pleasant experience at all, but also pytype, while very powerful at what it did, definitely had some flaws that put it firmly in the last generation of type checkers.
the current generation (mostly ty and pyrefly right now, though major props to pyright for being ahead of the curve) is moving towards fast, incremental type checking with LSP integration, and pytype was never going to get there. it's fundamentally a slow, batch-based type checker, which will catch a lot of errors in your project, but which will never be usable as an incremental type checker within your ide. add that to the fact that it had a different philosophy of type checking from most of the other major checkers and you had users facing the issue that their code would be checked one way by pyright in the ide, and then a subtly different way by pytype in the CI pipeline.
I loved my time working on pytype, and I would like to see some of its features added to pyrefly, but it has definitely been superseded by now.
I've heard of `ty` too but recently I learned about Pyrefly, which is not in pre-production alpha, and is also Rust: https://pyrefly.org/
Is there a good reason to avoid using Pyrefly?
> Is there a good reason to avoid using Pyrefly?
Wouldn't the other way around be easier for finding good tools? Figure out what matters to you, inspect if the project fulfills those needs and then go with it after making sure it works well for you.
Regardless, a comparison between the two was posted to HN not too long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44107655
> Wouldn't the other way around be easier for finding good tools?
I agree, and Pyrefly seemed good; I was just wondering why people don't mention it.
Thank you for the comparison thread and post, I've read it and found it useful! Thanks to that post I know ty has a "gradual typing" philosophy, which I disprefer.
(Pyrefly dev here) As another commenter mentioned, Pyrefly is still in alpha. Sorry we don't make that more clear!
While we are in alpha, and there are plenty of open issues we are still working through, I think Pyrefly is actually pretty usable already, especially for code navigation.
Hah, I stand corrected. In my defense, Ty make it a lot more obvious and ominous on their github (https://github.com/astral-sh/ty):
> /!\ Warning
> ty is in preview and is not ready for production use.
> We're working hard to make ty stable and feature-complete, but until then, expect to encounter bugs, missing features, and fatal errors.
(Pyrefly dev here) Thanks for trying it out! If you have any feedback or bug reports, please don't hesitate to file issues on GitHub or find us on Discord. We have some open issues for SQLAlchemy (like [1]). I'm definitely curious to hear if there are any gaps from your perspective, having an already strictly-typed codebase.
I mean, sqlalchemy until very recently needed a mypy plugin to type correctly (https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/20/orm/extensions/mypy.html), which was just deprecated in 2.0.0.
Perhaps you should do the upgrade (https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/20/changelog/whatsnew_20.html...) and try again?
In theory, nothing prevents the pytype team at Google to develop a new backend in a different language.
In practice, there is no longer a pytype team at Google [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125], which I suspect is the real reason for the discontinuation.