> Pyright was designed with performance in mind. It is not unusual for pyright to be 3x to 5x faster than mypy when type checking large code bases. Some of its design decisions were motivated by this goal.
> Pyright was also designed to be used as the foundation for a Python language server. Language servers provide interactive programming features such as completion suggestions, function signature help, type information on hover, semantic-aware search, semantic-aware renaming, semantic token coloring, refactoring tools, etc. For a good user experience, these features require highly responsive type evaluation performance during interactive code modification. They also require type evaluation to work on code that is incomplete and contains syntax errors.
> To achieve these design goals, pyright is implemented as a “lazy” or “just-in-time” type evaluator. Rather than analyzing all code in a module from top to bottom, it is able to evaluate the type of an arbitrary identifier anywhere within a module. If the type of that identifier depends on the types of other expressions or symbols, pyright recursively evaluates those in turn until it has enough information to determine the type of the target identifier. By comparison, mypy uses a more traditional multi-pass architecture where semantic analysis is performed multiple times on a module from the top to the bottom until all types converge.
> Pyright implements its own parser, which recovers gracefully from syntax errors and continues parsing the remainder of the source file. By comparison, mypy uses the parser built in to the Python interpreter, and it does not support recovery after a syntax error. This also means that when you run mypy on an older version of Python, it cannot support newer language features that require grammar changes.
Astral's type checker seems to an exercise in speeding up Pyright's approach to designing a type checker, and removing the Node dependency from it.
I haven't had any issues from MyPy regarding speed. So performance issues did not exist whenever I used MyPy. Also not sure why I need incremental anything. I save a file and then I want it to be checked.
If I am not implementing a LS, then how is it of any importance, whether the type checker was designed with typing a LS? How does that benefit me in my normal projects?
If there are no semantic improvements, that allow more type inference than MyPy allows, I don't see much going for Pyright. Sounds like a "ours is blazingly faster than the other" kind of sales pitch.
Just to throw my anecdote in: I used to work at the mypy shop - our client code base was on the order of millions of lines of very thorny Python code. This was several years ago, but to the best of my recollection, even at that scale, mypy was nowhere near that slow.
Like I said, this was many years ago - mypy might've gotten slower, but computers have also gotten faster, so who knows. My hunch is still that you have an issue with misconfiguration, or perhaps you're hitting a bug.
My current company is a Python shop, 1M+ LOC. My CI run earlier today completed mypy typechecking in 9 minutes 5 seconds. Take from that what you will.
Ditto, same order of magnitude experience; at least for --no-incremental runs.
Part of the problem for me is how easily caches get invalidated. A type error somewhere will invalidate the cache of the file and anything in its dependency tree, which blows a huge hole runtime.
Checking 1 file in a big repo can take 10 seconds, or more than a minute as a result.
I think you have something misconfigured, or are timing incorrectly. I'm working on a project right now with ~10K LOC. I haven't timed it, but it's easily <= 2 seconds. Even if I nuke MyPy's cache, it's at most 5 seconds. This is on an M3 MBP FWIW.
Pyright has semantic improvements (and also some differences) over MyPy. As for using the type checker as a language server, it's difficult to go back to “it's compiling” after you've had one stop you from typing bugs out in-flight.
To understand shortcomings of MyPy, I strongly suggest reading pyright's documentation for how they compare: https://github.com/microsoft/pyright/blob/main/docs/mypy-com...
Quoting the pertinent part:
> Pyright was designed with performance in mind. It is not unusual for pyright to be 3x to 5x faster than mypy when type checking large code bases. Some of its design decisions were motivated by this goal.
> Pyright was also designed to be used as the foundation for a Python language server. Language servers provide interactive programming features such as completion suggestions, function signature help, type information on hover, semantic-aware search, semantic-aware renaming, semantic token coloring, refactoring tools, etc. For a good user experience, these features require highly responsive type evaluation performance during interactive code modification. They also require type evaluation to work on code that is incomplete and contains syntax errors.
> To achieve these design goals, pyright is implemented as a “lazy” or “just-in-time” type evaluator. Rather than analyzing all code in a module from top to bottom, it is able to evaluate the type of an arbitrary identifier anywhere within a module. If the type of that identifier depends on the types of other expressions or symbols, pyright recursively evaluates those in turn until it has enough information to determine the type of the target identifier. By comparison, mypy uses a more traditional multi-pass architecture where semantic analysis is performed multiple times on a module from the top to the bottom until all types converge.
> Pyright implements its own parser, which recovers gracefully from syntax errors and continues parsing the remainder of the source file. By comparison, mypy uses the parser built in to the Python interpreter, and it does not support recovery after a syntax error. This also means that when you run mypy on an older version of Python, it cannot support newer language features that require grammar changes.
Astral's type checker seems to an exercise in speeding up Pyright's approach to designing a type checker, and removing the Node dependency from it.