[erlang-questions] dialyzer working with lfe, joxa, et. al?

[Robert Virding]

> From: "Kostis Sagonas" <kostis@REDACTED>
> 
> On 03/07/2013 06:48 PM, Robert Virding wrote:
> > Keep them crossed. :-) It's definitely not impossible, it "just"
> > needs the dialyzer people to implement hooks to which we (LFE,
> > Joxa, ...) can write plugins. It that were to happen I might even
> > add type specifications to LFE.
> 
> Even disregarding for the moment the question why would "the dialyzer
> people" care about lfe, joxa, et al., (dialyzer: Discrepancy Analyzer
> of
> *Erlang* code) if you are not more specific than the above wish how
> exactly do you expect them to know about the details of possible
> hooks
> that are needed by non-standard uses of dialyzer by other more exotic
> languages out there?

Well, if you want to be really strict then dialyzer works on *Core erlang* code. This is what dialyzer means by Erlang. So in this sense anything which generates Core erlang is *erlang* code from dialyzer's point of view. Whether it be LFE, Joxa, Elixir or whatever.

> Better yet, dialyzer's code base is on github, and thus one can
> submit
> patches (hint, hint!) that have a very good chance of being included
> in
> its code base if they do not break dialyzer's current functionality
> and
> come with tests that ensure that the extra functionality will not be
> accidentally broken in the future.

To be practical the people working with dialyzer could restructure it's input phase to use plugins based on file extension much faster than anyone else. Using it on erlang code would then just be another plugin, but one that is provided with dialyzer.

Robert