Code.fetch_docs is about fetching the “Docs” chunk of a beam file (as proposed initially here: Eep 0048 - Erlang/OTP), which specifically includes only documentation text. There is no chunk for types though. E.g. ex_doc seems to parse them from the abstract code provided in the debug_info (“Dbgi”) chunk. Dialyzer also fetches the what seems like core erlang code from the debug_info chunk. I’m wondering if there’s also some history around where and how that data is fetched (seems like there is). So the answer might be that there’s multiple ways to skin the cat and nobody bothered normalizing one of them within the elixir core codebase.
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