I just did some highly unscientific spelunking on the topic a couple hours ago, and my takeaway was more or less that a bunch of people on reddit said pyright was better.

You may already know this, but Pyright and Pylance are the same thing.

"Under the hood, Pylance is powered by Pyright," https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-pytho...

I've been using Pylance with `"python.analysis.typeCheckingMode": "basic"` for a long time and have found it quite good. Most of the time, the problem isn't Pylance/Pyright, but poor or wrong type annotations in third-party libraries.

ptx

Maybe they produce the same results (I don't know), but Pylance using Pyright doesn't mean that Pylance is Pyright.

One important difference in this case is that while "Pylance leverages Microsoft's open-source static type checking tool, Pyright" [1], Pylance itself is not open source. In fact, the license [2] restricts you to "use [...] the software only with [...] Microsoft products and services", which means that you are not allowed to use it with a non-Microsoft open source fork of VS Code, for example.

The license terms also say that by accepting the license, you agree that "The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft" and that "You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all".

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release

[2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-python.vscode-...