Contracts.ruby – Code contracts for Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Contracts.ruby – Code contracts for Ruby

egonschiele.github.io

26 pointsimd237 comments

Author here. Feel free to ask me any questions!

Is there any way to do static analysis using these contracts? Or is the way to find issues at runtime?

There's no way to do static analysis on Ruby. There are projects that have succeeded in doing it on a subset of Ruby, but they are not very popular since they can't support the full language.

What is the use case of 'contracts' exactly? From what I understand this is not standard ruby, it's something that comes from another language, right?

Why should I use contracts and not do something like: "var.is_a? Float/String/etc." using exceptions to handle errors, which looks much more elegant/rub-ish to me.

ps. I'm an developing ruby applications for fun mostly although I have received a few ruby job offers. I am not an advanced ruby developer, so feel free to verbose :-)

EDIT: Okay, maybe this can be used to enhance a testing framework?!

Good question!

I made the screencast to explain the use case: https://vimeo.com/85883356

My co-maintainer Alexey wrote a blog post explaining it too: http://waterlink.github.io/blog/2015/03/06/introduction-to-c...

Depends on your definition of "standard Ruby". "Contract" is really just a very clever method available in class scope on classes which use this library. It's certainly inspired by method signature syntax in other languages, but at its core, it's all implemented using metaprogramming facilities provided by Ruby's "Module" and "Class" classes. It's a bit unorthodox, but it's also a great example of how Ruby can be "molded" to be more expressive while still being pretty much the same language.

As far as the use case is concerned: more or less, it's executable documentation. In an expressive way, it both explains what to expect from the method, and gives useful error messages when those expectations are not met- which saves you the trouble of figuring it out yourself.

One of the most annoying things in Ruby is trying to figure out why a NoMethodError is getting thrown 40 frames down in the call stack, in code you didn't personally write. Worse, a method just doesn't behave the way you'd expect, and you're not sure why. Generally speaking, the unexpected behavior is because the "implicit contract" of some method along the way changed, and the methods around it weren't updated to handle the new return value. Boom, now somewhere in your call stack you're getting a "NoMethodError: Undefined method 'foobar' for nil:NilClass" and it's going to take 30 minutes of tracing in pry to figure out where something's being called wrong.

As far as doing the same thing using "is_a?" and friends: you certainly could, but that adds a lot of noise to your method body. When I'm looking at a method, I want to cut through that noise and answer the question: "what does this method actually do?" That said, I still want the benefits of validating my arguments and return values. This gives me both.

this looks great! thanks egonschiele!

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