Types will win in the end (Interview)

This week we’re talking about type checking with Jake Zimmerman. Jake is one of the leads at Stripe working on Sorbet — an open source project that does Type checking in Ruby and runs over Stripe’s entire Ruby codebase. As of May of 2022 Stripe’s codebase was over 15 million lines of code spread across 150,000 files. If you think you have a bigger Ruby codebase, Jake is down to go byte-for-byte to see who wins. Jake shares tons of wisdom and more importantly he shares why he thinks types will win in the end.

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Featuring:

• Jake Zimmerman – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• sorbet.org
• Getting started with Sorbet
• Sorbet: Stripe’s type checker for Ruby

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Chagnelog
(01:00) - Sponsor: Sentry
(05:02) - Start the show!
(10:59) - Sorbet's origin story
(15:32) - Stripe's use of Sorbet
(17:10) - This is a big deal
(19:58) - Ruby doesn't want to be type checked
(24:14) - Method missing?
(25:39) - Sponsor: Drata
(27:22) - First-party Ruby types
(35:14) - Why aren't Types built in?
(37:37) - Sorbet's implementation and design
(46:12) - RBI vs RBS?
(51:19) - Stripe has the largest Ruby codebase
(52:46) - Adopting Sorbet
(54:27) - Editor support
(56:55) - Types will win
(58:36) - Jake's language of choice
(1:00:18) - The name "Sorbet"
(1:02:54) - Up next!