alt Hacker NewsI haven't looked at Ruby for a long time. I've moved away due to the lack of typing. Any degree of typing would be helpful. Does it support typing yet?
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In my honest opinion, if you can't live without static typing, Ruby just isn't for you.
Adding static typing to a dynamic language mostly gives you the disadvantages of both, without a lot of benefits. It's better to stick to languages that were designed with static types from the start.
I love programming in Ruby, having to worry about type annotations and the additional constraints that come with them would take a lot of the fun out of that.
Unfortunately, the type support is still useless. I abandoned Ruby for the same reason, and it is still relatively slow and eats a lot of memory.
There's an official format for defining types in separate files (RBS) and some tooling to type check them (matz doesn't like types next to the source code).
There's a pretty battle tested tool to define inline types as ruby syntax and type check both statically and at runtime[0].
It's still not a particularly nice situation imvho compared to typescript or python, but there's been some movement, and there's a newsletter that follows static typing developments [1] which may give you some insights.
There is [RBS](https://sorbet.org/) (part of ruby 3) and [sorbet](https://sorbet.org/). To be honest, these aren't widely used as far as I am aware. I don't know if it is runtime overhead, ergonomics, lack of type checking interest in the ruby community or something else. Type enforcement isn't a big part of ruby, and doesn't seem to be gaining much momentum.
We have been adding Sorbet typing to our Rails application and it is a positive enhancement.
It’s not like Ruby becomes Haskell. But it does provide a good deal of additional saftey, less testing, LSP integration is good, and it is gradual.
There is a performance hit but we found it to be quite small and not an issue.
But there are area of our application that use Grape and it is too meta for Sorbet so we don’t try and use it there.
There’s projects trying to implement it. But I’ve never seen a project using typed Ruby.
I think most people who cared just moved to typescript.
_low_type_ is early days still, but I think this approach is clearly the future of ruby typing. If this gets baked into the language for full “compile” time support and minimal performance impact, it will be amazing: https://github.com/low-rb/low_type