There’s so much excitement around static typing that I really want to figure out how to use it effectively.
I spent a lot of time putting in specs for dialyzer and found I spent more time debugging specs than I found bugs.
For my codebase, the compiler showed warnings or the app would just crash on that particular codepath, but dialyzer rarely showed anything useful for the amount of time spent with it. My understanding is that static typing should help in finding bugs without having to go to the runtime of that particular codepath.
Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, but the data coming in from liveview handlers from params or socket.assigns doesn’t have a particular shape to it.
For instance, if I have:
def handle_event("square", params, _socket) do
number = Parser.safe_to_float(params["number"])
square(number)
end
@spec square(number :: float) :: float
def square(number) do
number*number
end
Pretty much all the data is coming in from input from params, so it doesn’t seem that dialyzer really picks anything up. Am I doing something wrong? Is static typing not going to work for this? Would adding a spec to safe_to_float make a difference? It’s not a small codebase, so I’m hesitant to spend effort on something that might not make a difference.
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.98 T=0.16 s (1271.0 files/s, 320985.7 lines/s)
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Language files blank comment code
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Elixir 142 4984 9688 26995
EEx 55 491 0 5758
CSS 2 84 107 1041
Zig 4 173 151 933
Markdown 3 311 9 833
JavaScript 1 64 113 543
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SUM: 207 6107 10068 36103
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