[ANN] Automatic Clojure Type Annotations

[Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant]

Hi,

Happy to announce a new open-source Clojure tool

to generate core.typed type annotations from tests. It's part of a

new crowdfunding campaign I'm running, read on for details!

# What is it?

This tool infers top-level annotations by instrumenting

your code, running tests, and finally inserts inferred

annotations directly in your source code.

Here's a quick gif demonstrating the tool.

You can read more about the ideas behind the tool here.

# Prototype: Write Tests, Get Types!

The latest core.typed release contains a

prototype for Automatic Annotation inference.

Try it out here!

# Crowdfunding

I am running a crowdfunding campaign to support

Automatic Annotations for Typed Clojure. The money

will help me keep working on Typed Clojure and travel

to industry conferences.

I will be writing more about how this tool works, and

the general applicability of the infrastructure its

based on. 

For example:

- clojure.spec generative tests can help generate type annotations, and

- the infrastructure could even be repurposed to generate clojure.spec specs!

- mutually recursive map structures can be inferred

- ideas for polymorphic inference

There are only 7 days left and we need $7,500 to

reach our goal. Please help by contributing!

Thanks for your support!

Ambrose

[Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant]

Here's a demo of generating clojure.spec specs + Typed Clojure types

for functions and macros.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRJeHthzOjk

Thanks for your support!

Ambrose

[Leon Grapenthin]

Wow. I can imagine this saving a day or two when trying to type or spec a legacy codebase.

Wouldn't it also be / Is it possible to infer deeper calling levels?

I. e. if (defn f [x] (g x)) generate types/specs for g and f from (f 42)?

Because when one doesn't have unit tests, she could gain exponentially more types/specs from only calling some top level functions with constants.

Thank you for doing this and kind regards, Leon.

[Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant]

Thanks Leon!

In fact, untyped libraries are already inferred. See this and this post.

[Jeroen van Dijk]

Hi Ambrose,

We, AdGoji, want to make a contribution to your campaign as a company. The GoGo things seems to be tied to a person, or did I miss something?

Thanks,

Jeroen

[Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant]

Hi Jeroen,

I'm not attached to a company, if that's what you mean. The contributions via indiegogo will be sent directly to me.

Thanks,
Ambrose

[Jeroen van Dijk]

Hi Ambrose,

No sorry I mean AdGoji/the company wants to contribute to you, but the Indiegogo seems to be for a specific person to make the contribution. I.e. I would like to fill in the company name there. What do you advise?

Thanks,

Jeroen

[Jeroen van Dijk]

Ok I figured it doesn't matter. I've filled it in anyway.

Cheers,

Jeroen