What does HackerNews think of tapioca?

Have you tried Tapioca (https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca) with Sorbet? Typing in general has ways to go sure, but I find this combination quite usable in my day to day.

It is, but Shopify uses it as well and maintains the companion tool, tapioca.

https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca

Tapioca is used to generate type signatures on gems and code that creates functions at runtime. Sorbet ships with some of that behavior, but they updated their docs to recommend tapioca over sorbet where the behavior overlaps.

Somewhat. They don't all need super specific types for every method they've defined, but Sorbet does at least need to know all the classes, modules, and constants in use in your codebase, whether those come from code you've written or code inside gems.

But there's tooling (first-party and third-party) that will either download or generate RBI files defining constants that come from gems. `srb init` is the first party solution, and Shopify's `tapioca` gem is the most popular third-party solution[1].

Unfortunately, because Ruby doesn't have import statements at the top of every file, Sorbet can't just do something like silently treat unknown imports as not having a type (like TypeScript and Flow can do), because then it would never be able to tell between "exists but unknown" vs "typo; does not exist" for constant definitions. This definitely makes the adoption process a little tricker compared to other languages, but it's generally a one-time thing once you've got the tooling set up.

Also if you're ever having trouble getting the tooling to work, there's a lot of people chatting about Sorbet daily at https://sorbet.org/slack

[1] https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca

Regarding Sorbet and Rails, I recommend Tapioca [1].

The Rails app that I worked on had a few edge cases Tapioca didn't cover so I wrote a simple script to load the Rails app and generate RBI files (e.g. generate RBI definitions for fixture methods in ApplicationTestCase). The Tapioca codebase helped provide a path for that [2]. Tapioca also continues to add to their DSL compilers. The work to integrate Sorbet paid off very quickly.

Also, T::Enum and T::Struct are handy in any Ruby codebase.

[1] https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca [2] https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca/tree/main/lib/tapioca/com...

I believe Stripe and Shopify only use RBI in production since Stripe develops Sorbet [0] and Shopify develops Tapioca [1]. Both tools work exclusively with RBI files instead of RBS files afaik. I haven't heard of anyone using RBS in production.

[0] - https://sorbet.org/

[1] - https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca