Very excited to hear about this. Elixir is a fantastic language but tooling lags behind some other options, a type system should help with that.
Just out of curiosity. What other options?
As much as I appreciate the work the team has done, I think we have to be honest about the good and bad parts. ElixirLS has never worked quite right for me, or most other Elixir developers I know. It's often painfully slow to respond even in small project, it often gets stuck in obscure failures that require an editor reload to get it fully working again. If you run into any kind of issue with it, the boilerplate response it always: Try running `rm -rf .elixir_ls _build` which sometimes works, but usually not.
Javascript, Typescript have immaculate tooling in this regard, same goes for Java, C#, Go, even Python (on IDE side, the package management situation is of course a dumpster fire). I'd go as far as to say that any language supported by Jetbrains has better tooling than Elixir does.
Check out next-ls aims to replace ElixirLS.
https://www.elixir-tools.dev/next-ls/
There's a podcast/interview from its creator below.
macOS only, closed source, and VC funded :(
I don't work on a Mac, so it's a non-starter for me, but I'd be very reluctant to switch my workflow to an early stage VC funded product because I don't like having my rug pulled.
I had that problem with NeoVim's Mason plugin that manages language servers, then I just cloned `elixir-ls` and made a super small script to update it daily from GitHub and recompile it. I use that in NeoVim instead and it works near-instantly. Give it a try.
I don't disagree that IDE support can look subpar but I'd also venture a guess that proper IDE support is very first-world problem. You won't find yourself working on projects with millions of lines in Elixir ever, and thus not having e.g. full-blown IDE refactoring has never been a problem for me or any other Elixir dev I know.
All that being said, literally nothing I have ever saw was able to beat Golang's and OCaml's language servers. They just work and are amazingly fast to boot. It's simply a joy coding in those languages with their LS. Rust is trailing closely behind but it's also a fact that its LS is objectively slower -- still, they seem to have made a lot of strides on that front lately and it's much better compared to even one year ago.
Me too!
Have you learned any tricks for getting up to speed on large code bases with very limited static typing?
In recent years I've mostly worked on large, complex Python systems. The consequences of (undisciplined) dynamic typing not only sapped my joy in programming, it really burned me out.
Some people are really good at living with code bases like that. I'm not one of them, but I'm still hoping to find some way to bridge the mental gap.
For me it didn't go that far, fortunately, because I managed to jump ship on time... But it was getting _tiring_.
> Have you learned any tricks (...)?
My current apprach is: don't. These days I usually work in Rust, C# and sometimes Typescript. I'm only open to working with dynamically typed languages for short periods of time, as a side quest of the main task (e.g. for my last contract I had to read quite some C code, which somewhat resembled dynamically typed code, but I spent even more time writing Rust, so it was OK).
Eh, thanks. That's my approach as well. I was just hoping for some silver bullet I guess.