What do you prefer to use for type checking Elixir/Erlang code? (poll)

Some followup up questions/discussion:

• If you chose a tool on the poll (or answered “other”), what do you use, why do you use it, and how do you use it?
• If you don’t use any form of type checking tool, do you still bother maintaining typespecs? Is there some other process or tool you use besides the usual manual code review and unit/integration testing?
• If you use Dialyxir/Dialyzer, have you figured out how to use the new --incremental mode? As far as I can tell, incremental mode is not usable on Elixir code (yet).
  • dialyzer: Add incremental analysis mode by TD5 · Pull Request #5997 · erlang/otp · GitHub
  • Not using Dialyzer Incrementally · Issue #105 · jeremyjh/dialyxir · GitHub
• As far as I know, eqwalizer isn’t usable from Elixir (yet); is that correct, or have you found a way to use them?
  • eqwalizer/FAQ.md at main · WhatsApp/eqwalizer · GitHub

Related poll for those interested…

If you don’t use any form of type checking tool, do you still bother maintaining typespecs?

Yes, althought I’m sorta bipolar about this. On the one hand, they really help as docs. On the other hand, at times writing them, while knowing that they ultimately mean nothing as they aren’t enforced, feels rather pointless.

I always try to use Dialyzer and typespecs as much as possible. Even for project where I don’t use Dialyzer, typespecs are used.

At work, Dialyzer warning are tracked by our CI-tool. Builds don’t fail when introducing Dialyzer warnings, but there is a strict agreement om fixing those warnings as quick as possible.

I have tried several of the other tools, but they simply don’t work on our code base - they usually crash in one way or another.
Would love some faster and more accurate type analyser tools, but for now Dialyzer works and does indeed find potential issues.

Checking out if I can use https://gleam.run for most of my code and just have the necessary parts like Phoenix and Ecto in Elixir.

We use Dialyzer and CI fails if there are any warnings. Also, we recently enabled the unmatched_returns flag, which I can recommend.

Regarding other tools, I thought about trying TypeCheck and enabling it in tests. Given good coverage, I’d expect it to be quite accurate.

There also was GitHub - Comcast/dialyzex: A Mix task for type-checking your Elixir project with dialyzer · GitHub which for me was more pleasant to use than Dialyxir, but it seems to be dead.

I have also considered doing that, but haven’t had the time to look into it properly.
So if you can share anything about how this works out for you, I would be really interested!

I will! Currently I’m writing a little code generation thing so that I can read Ecto schema structs in a type safe way in Gleam (I’m calling it Neglecto). But I’ll post a separate thread about it if it goes somewhere.

With regards to alternative BEAM languages, I’m currently learning Purerl, which is Purescript with Erlang as the backend. The interop story is very good: running PS code from Elixir is very easy, and FFI in Purescript seems to also be frictionless. They also have OTP, Gun, etc bindings. However, I can see why it didn’t get more traction: I’ve been studying it for a couple weeks, I’ve writtern monad transformers but I still don’t know how to make a simple GET request . But, it’s fun and powerful, so I’m looking forward to learn it and eventually use it with my Elixir code.