I think I understand GP's motivation: RBI files and RBS files are two different formats, and as a user of the language, people tend to want to use the officially blessed solution the language provides.
In case you weren't aware, parlour[1] is a popular open source project for working with RBI files. I believe it supports transparently converting between RBI files (Sorbet) and RBS files (Ruby 3).
There is also rbs_parser[2], a C++ parser for RBS files to convert them to RBI files, written by Shopify, a major user of Sorbet.
Stepping back: I haven't personally read many complaints from Sorbet users describing how the current state of RBI/RBS interop gets in the way of what they can actually do with Sorbet. Almost all the feature requests we get about Sorbet (both inside Stripe and outside) are for fixing bugs or implementing new language-level features. RBI files as implemented seem to work.
Sorbet already has an extensive set of RBI files covering the Ruby standard library (at least as good or better to my knowledge than any existing repository of types for RBS files), and there are plentiful tools for working with RBI files, listed here.[3]
If lack of first-party RBS support in Sorbet is holding you back from trying Sorbet, I'd strongly encourage you to give Sorbet a try anyways! Many people have shared great experiences adopting Sorbet in their Ruby codebases.
What are your thoughts on eventually forking the language and moving it in a different direction? Like 100% typed and AOT compiled, similar to Hack/PHP situation with Facebook.
We're reluctant to completely fork the language. We benefit from so many open source tools, technologies, and libraries built around Ruby. For example: we've built:
- A type checker
- LSP-based editor tooling
- A compiler
But we haven't:
- implemented our own GraphQL, protobuf, gRPC, or JSON libraries
- built a Ruby debugger or debug protocol adapter
- built custom performance monitoring tools
- etc.
There might come a time when it makes sense to fork the language, but we've been very reluctant to do so from the start, because we know what we'd be throwing away. "Compatible with Ruby" has been an explicit design principle of Sorbet from the start:
Would you guys ever consider reimplementing the runtime for more aggressive optimizations? Thinking back that was the first step Facebook took towards their Hack transition.
I think I understand GP's motivation: RBI files and RBS files are two different formats, and as a user of the language, people tend to want to use the officially blessed solution the language provides.
In case you weren't aware, parlour[1] is a popular open source project for working with RBI files. I believe it supports transparently converting between RBI files (Sorbet) and RBS files (Ruby 3).
There is also rbs_parser[2], a C++ parser for RBS files to convert them to RBI files, written by Shopify, a major user of Sorbet.
Stepping back: I haven't personally read many complaints from Sorbet users describing how the current state of RBI/RBS interop gets in the way of what they can actually do with Sorbet. Almost all the feature requests we get about Sorbet (both inside Stripe and outside) are for fixing bugs or implementing new language-level features. RBI files as implemented seem to work.
Sorbet already has an extensive set of RBI files covering the Ruby standard library (at least as good or better to my knowledge than any existing repository of types for RBS files), and there are plentiful tools for working with RBI files, listed here.[3]
If lack of first-party RBS support in Sorbet is holding you back from trying Sorbet, I'd strongly encourage you to give Sorbet a try anyways! Many people have shared great experiences adopting Sorbet in their Ruby codebases.
[1] https://github.com/AaronC81/parlour
[2] https://github.com/Shopify/rbs_parser
[3] https://sorbet.org/en/community