[59nadir]

dialyzer is terrible and doesn't actually work in practice, as is evidenced by the many dialyzer errors that slip through to current releases on hex of libraries even the size of Phoenix, StreamData, etc.... Even the major community members don't use it. It's not a substitute for a type system and especially not one that allows you to properly model things in it.

[dnautics]

have you used it with elixir_ls? I find that in practice it catches about 80% of my errors before I send them to test.

[59nadir]

Yeah, I managed to get our team members to use ElixirLS for this very reason, but in the end I found that it doesn't work when it matters. The good thing about ElixirLS is that at least you have to configure something to disable dialyzer, so by default to at least get some coverage…

In the end you need to some kind of compiler that does proper, rigorous and unapologetic type checking. If Alpaca could reach critical mass I could convince our project leader to use it, which would solve the problem entirely.

Sure, the ecosystem would likely remain the same in that the majority of people simply don't actually have any familiarity with strong, static typing, but at the very least you can now set up these guards yourself and you can have code that is much more likely to be safe and good.