Comment by comex

Comment by comex 4 days ago

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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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19486938