Same same but different: Static type checkers for Erlang - Annette Bieniusa & A. Schimpf | Code BEAM

CodeSync · March 6, 2025, 2:00pm

This talk was recorded at Code BEAM Europe in October 2024. If you’re curious about our upcoming event, check https://codebebeameurope.com

Though Erlang’s type annotations were originally intended for documentation purposes, static analysis tools soon utilized them for semantic checks. However, due to a need for more semantic agreement on Erlang’s type annotations, their results differ in ways that can be challenging for users to interpret. In our session, we cross-compare four state-of-the-art tools (Dialyzer, Gradualizer, eqWAlizer, etylizer) regarding their expressivity and performance. Their unified test suites provide a good starting point to understand their respective capabilities and limitations. Insights into the underlying approaches can help Erlang developers make an educated choice which analysis tool to use for their projects and how to interpret the result of a type check.

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