Type safety

[GabiGrin]

Type safety in Flyde is something I have thought about for quite a while. I had the chance to discuss it some more in a comment on daily.dev and think it deserved to be here as well.

@danielro515:
@gabrielgrinberg I am curious to know how all this is typed. Didn’t saw any references to types I’m the docs, ams I am a strong type lover. Ideally I want to get errors if I try to connect incompatible typed nodes.

Response:
@danielro515 not typed atm 🫢 but it is planned.

I'm a strong type lover myself, but I don't think regular typing concepts translate to Flyde in a simple manner.
Flyde's strength isn't going to be on simple methods, where types are easy to define, but more on higher-level services, third-party APIs, and so on, where types are dynamic and can change without previous notice.
I do plan to make it easy for Flyde to surface errors when they happen, and easy for Flyde to help where the shape of the data is known.
The way I plan to tackle this is a mix of classic type annotations for simple nodes accompanied by a "historic runtime type data" mechanism that will leverage real data from tests (even production!) to help avoid stupid mistakes, or just provide helpful autocomplete when drilling down a complex object.

Armed with this mix of structured type data and historical runtime data, Flyde's editor will surface potential errors, but in a non-blocking way - more of a linter than a compiler.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this direction.