2017-11-26 6:00 GMT-05:00 Kirill Balunov <kirillbalunov@gmail.com>:

Hi!

2017-11-26 4:31 GMT+03:00 Juan Nunez-Iglesias <jni.soma@gmail.com>:

On 26 Nov 2017, 12:27 PM +1100, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com>, wrote:

It turns out that the PEP 484 type system is *mostly* not useful for
this. They're really designed for checking consistency across a large
code-base, not for enabling compiler speedups. For example, if you
annotate something as an int, that means "this object is a subclass of
int". This is enough to let mypy catch your mistake if you
accidentally pass in a float instead, but it's not enough to tell you
anything at all about the object's behavior -- you could make a wacky
int subclass that acts like a string or something.

I have subscribed to many lists, although I am not an active participant in them. Nevertheless this topic of using the type annotation in their projects was discussed several times on all Cython-like channels (and it becomes much more acute now days). "Misconceptions" arise both for ordinary users and developers, but I have never seen anyone to write clearly why the application of type annotation in Cython (and similar projects) is impossible or not reasonable. Maybe someone close to the topic has the time and energy to sum up and write a brief summary of how to perceive them and why they should be viewed "orthogonal"?

Maybe I'm looking too superficially at this topic. But both Mypy and Cython perform type checking. From the Cython point of view I do not see any pitfalls, type checking and type conversions are what Cython is doing right now during compilation (and looks at types as strictly as necessary).
From Mypy's point of view, it's possible that it can delegate all this stuff, using a certain option, on a project's related type checker (which can be much stricter in its assumptions)

The main (perceived) difficulty is that the type systems are different. If Cython has a list-typed argument, it wants exactly a list so it can use specialized code for lists, but to mypy it means "list or a subclass of list", which is not as easily optimized because the subclass may do things differently from the base class. Similarly, to Cython an int means a C int, and in Python it may mean an arbitrary-precision integer.

However, Cython managed to overcome the problem and actually added support for type annotations recently; see https://github.com/cython/cython/issues/1672 and https://github.com/cython/cython/issues/1850. I haven't used the support myself and there are probably still details to be worked out, but in principle it should be possible to use both Cython and mypy on a codebase.

With kind regards, -gdg

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