A Scoop of Sorbet - First Impressions

Stripe just released a new gem for static typing in Ruby called Sorbet after a long period of teasing at it publicly at conferences like Ruby Kaigi.

Let's take a look into it and see what we find. These will be my first impressions reading through the library, which may change with use and experimentation. Your experiences may be different, and you should write about them too!

Homepage

Stripe being Stripe, the homepage is nice, clean, and to the point. I kinda want to make a purple site now. Anyways, design aside...

We start off with a basic example:

# typed: true
extend T::Sig

sig {params(name: String).returns(Integer)}
def main(name)
  puts "Hello, #{name}!"
  name.length
end

main("Sorbet") # ok!
main()   # error: Not enough arguments provided
man("")  # error: Method `man` does not exist

A Taste of Sorbet

The first thing I notice here is the head comment of typed: true. I wonder if that's a compiler flag and is required in every file that runs it. I'd guess so, somewhat like frozen string literals in Ruby.

We're extending from T::Sig which I would assume to be the type signature methods.

sig itself takes a block. Not fond of the style of no-spacing it, as that's a bit hard to read. Adding a few spaces makes it easier to parse visually:

sig { params(name: String).returns(Integer) }
def main(name)
  puts "Hello, #{name}!"
  name.length
end

But that's more of a personal preference than anything.

Issues

I'd like to be able to copy and paste that first example and see it run as expected. Given that we're not including anything from sorbet yet, it will fail as-is. A five second to action, if you will, has quite the impact. I think it's possible but may encumber that first example, so it's understandable it doesn't work quite that simply.

Get started quickly

I'm going to try this in a project that has a barebones Gemfile and no other code, just to see what happens. If that fails, I'll switch over to one of my toy gems to see how it works on a project.

We'll start in a new barebones project called strawberry_sorbet, with a Gemfile:

# Gemfile

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'sorbet', group: :development
gem 'sorbet-runtime'

Then install that:

➜  strawberry_sorbet git:(master) ✗ bundle
Using bundler 2.0.1
Using sorbet-static 0.4.4271 (universal-darwin-17)
Using sorbet 0.4.4271
Using sorbet-runtime 0.4.4271
Bundle complete! 2 Gemfile dependencies, 4 gems now installed.
Use `bundle info [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

Now let's see Sorbet go with srb init:

➜  strawberry_sorbet git:(master) ✗ srb init

👋 Hey there!

This script will get this project ready to use with Sorbet by creating a
sorbet/ folder for your project. It will contain:

- a config file
- a bunch of 'RBI files'

RBI stands for 'Ruby Interface'; these files define classes, methods, and
constants that exist, but which Sorbet doesn't always know about.

⚠️  Heads up:

To set up your project, this script will take two potentially destructive
actions:

1.  It will require every file in your project. Specifically, every script in
    your project will be run, unless that script checks if __FILE__ == $PROGRAM_NAME
    before running any code, or has the magic comment # typed: ignore in it.

2.  It will add a comment to the top of every file (like # typed: false or
    # typed: true, depending on how many errors were found in that file.)

❔ Would you like to continue? [Y/n]

I kinda wonder if there's a -y flag to bypass this for projects that know they want it and know said risks.

if __FILE__ == $PROGRAM_NAME is a throwback, haven't seen that in a while.

Let's see it run then!

❔ Would you like to continue? [Y/n] Y

Generating: sorbet/config
Generating: sorbet/rbi/sorbet-typed/
Generating: sorbet/rbi/gems/
Generating: sorbet/rbi/hidden-definitions/
// snipped
Generating split RBIs into sorbet/rbi/hidden-definitions/
Generating: sorbet/rbi/todo.rbi

✅ Done!

This project is now set up for use with Sorbet. The sorbet/ folder should exist
and look something like this:

    sorbet/
    ├──  config                      # Default options to passed to sorbet on every run
    └──  rbi/
        ├──  sorbet-typed/           # Community writen type definition files for your gems
        ├──  gems/                   # Autogenerated type definitions for your gems (from reflection)
        ├──  hidden-definitions/     # All definitions that exist at runtime, but Sorbet couldn't see statically
        └──  todo.rbi                # Constants which were still missing, even after the three steps above.

Please check this whole folder into version control.

➡️   What's next?

Up to you! First things first, you'll probably want to typecheck your project:

    srb tc

Other than that, it's up to you!
We recommend skimming these docs to get a feel for how to use Sorbet:

- Gradual Type Checking (https://sorbet.org/docs/gradual)
- Enabling Static Checks (https://sorbet.org/docs/static)
- RBI Files (https://sorbet.org/docs/rbi)

If instead you want to explore your files locally, here are some things to try:

- Upgrade a file marked # typed: false to # typed: true.
  Then, run srb tc and try to fix any errors.
- Add signatures to your methods with `sig`.
  For how, read: https://sorbet.org/docs/sigs
- Check whether things that show up in the TODO RBI file actually exist in your project.
  It's possible some of these constants are typos.
- Upgrade a file marked # typed: ignore to # typed: false.
  Then, run srb tc and try to fix any errors.

🙌  Please don't hesitate to give us your feedback!

Now that's a good deal of text, let's take a look into it. We'll ignore a lot of the generated files for now, that's likely the subject of an entire writeup of its own.

Folder Layout

This project is now set up for use with Sorbet. The sorbet/ folder should exist
and look something like this:

    sorbet/
    ├──  config                      # Default options to passed to sorbet on every run
    └──  rbi/
        ├──  sorbet-typed/           # Community writen type definition files for your gems
        ├──  gems/                   # Autogenerated type definitions for your gems (from reflection)
        ├──  hidden-definitions/     # All definitions that exist at runtime, but Sorbet couldn't see statically
        └──  todo.rbi                # Constants which were still missing, even after the three steps above.

Looking at the tree, it's nice to have that visually represented. There's a small typo there (writen -> written), but not a hard fix.

The community written definitions and autogenerated gem type definitions are interesting, I'll have to look into that as well later.

Version Control

Please check this whole folder into version control.

It's noted that this should be checked into version control. Given that this is a schema-like system, that'd be a good idea to make sure you don't lose typing information. Not sure how much you want to manually edit things in this folder yet, but I would assume some at the least.

Next Steps

There are some next steps right after:

➡️   What's next?

Up to you! First things first, you'll probably want to typecheck your project:

    srb tc

The Homepage Example

So I have the example problem stored with the failing lines commented out for later, let's see what it does:

# 01_homepage.rb

# typed: strong

require 'sorbet'

extend T::Sig

sig {params(name: String).returns(Integer)}
def main(name)
  puts "Hello, #{name}!"
  name.length
end

main("Sorbet") # ok!
# main()   # error: Not enough arguments provided
# man("")  # error: Method `man` does not exist

Running srb tc on the working file yields:

➜  strawberry_sorbet git:(master) ✗ srb tc
No errors! Great job.

Inducing Errors

Let's uncomment that first error line:

main()   # error: Not enough arguments provided

...and running it again gives us:

➜  strawberry_sorbet git:(master) ✗ srb tc
01_homepage.rb:14: Not enough arguments provided for method Object#main. Expected: 1, got: 0 https://srb.help/7004
    14 |main()   # error: Not enough arguments provided
        ^^^^^^
    01_homepage.rb:8: Object#main defined here
     8 |def main(name)
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Errors: 1

Oh that's nice. Not only did it trace out that error that was mentioned on the homepage, but it also gave us the surrounding context of the method that was called so we could potentially see what went wrong there.

I wonder what happens if we pass an invalid type to it:

main(42)

We'll get:

01_homepage.rb:14: Integer(42) does not match String for argument name https://srb.help/7002
    14 |main(42)
        ^^^^^^^^
    01_homepage.rb:7: Method Object#main has specified name as String
     7 |sig {params(name: String).returns(Integer)}
                    ^^^^
  Got Integer(42) originating from:
    01_homepage.rb:14:
    14 |main(42)
             ^^
Errors: 1

So we get the value, the type, the method type signature, and some other details about tracing what exactly went wrong. They really did an excellent job of exposing context, and make this particular bug easy to track down and isolate.

We'll have to dig into this more later.

Designed to be Interactive

I'd had the pleasure some time ago to be chatting with Matz about some of his dreams for Ruby 3, and high on his list was an idea of a language server that could interact with editors and allow for cleaner refactoring and coding in general.

To see it become real is something else entirely.

It would be nice to have a link here to how to set up said editors, as I'd be clicking it quite quickly to see how it works.

First Impression Opinions?

This reminds me a lot of Rust and some other languages, and it feels like Static typing done right that gives you information rather than being overtly pedantic.

My opinions may change as I play with this more, and play I shall. The first items I intend to go about are:

1. How === works with this
2. How union or product types might work
3. If the system can handle interfaces like is_a?(Enumerable)
4. How the language server works
5. How this might be used in conjunction with Whitequark's Parser
6. If this can be used with Rubocop for refactoring / codemods
7. If this could potentially be used for Category Theory specs like Fantasy Land in Ruby

I expect there will be more as I have more chances to play with this, but that's it for a first read-through.

What are you curious about learning in Sorbet?

Comments

[Max Cerrina]

We're using it on my project at work right now, so I've been using it quite a lot actually. I spent the weekend playing with it/getting familiar and mostly enjoyed it, and enjoy it 100000x more now that I found the beta VSCode plugin for it that does use the language server protocol, and thus you get refactorings, etc. (Bonus, it's about 10000000000000000x faster than the other Ruby plugin I was using.)

[Bijan]

I'm hesitant to write signatures definitions but like typescript definitions sorbet has the potential to offer better code completion for Gems that have annotations available.
I'm not so sure how to integrate it into VSCode, Sublime, RubyMine or Atom though. Invoking the commandline is okayish but I'd prefer better integration. Are there projects in the works to integrate into IDE(ditors)?

[Victor Hazbun]

This is not how Ruby was supposed to be.

[markus heiler]

Good summary. I don't get as to why we would need any of this but you are just the messenger, not the one who wrote it. ;)