mypy-plugin-attempt

Turns out it's not very easy, because there's not a lot of documentation on mypy's part; and the internals of mypy are a bit messy and hard to understand.

I hope it's at least somewhat helpful if you're making your own mypy plugin. You can see a brief demo in test.py. I have tested this plugin with mypy==1.1.1 and mypy==0.931.

I was able to achieve two humble goals with this plugin:

Defining "structs" with typed fields

Something similar to dataclasses or namedtuple.

UserInfo = struct(
    ("name", "string"),
    ("age", "integer"),
    ("city", "string?"),
)

###

u3 = UserInfo(  # ok
    name="Bob",
    age=42,
    city=None,
)

u4 = UserInfo(  # error
    name="Charlie",
    age="old",
    city=None
)


def f(u: UserInfo):
    reveal_type(u.name)  # inferred type: str
    reveal_type(u.city)  # inferred type: str | None

Typing asyncio.gather

Python's "type system" doesn't support this kind of transformation:

() -> Aw[tuple()]
(Aw[T1]) -> Aw[tuple[T1,]]
(Aw[T1], Aw[T2]) -> Aw[tuple[T1, T2]]
(Aw[T1], Aw[T2], Aw[T3]) -> Aw[tuple[T1, T2, T3]]

So pretty fundamental functions like asyncio.gather have to resort to a staircase of overloads.

The gathers decorator lets you express this transformation. It doesn't do anything at runtime.

@gathers
def my_gather(*args) -> Awaitable:
    ...


async def foo() -> int:
    return 42

async def bar() -> str:
    return "hey"

async def main() -> None:
    x = await my_gather(foo(), bar(), bar())
    reveal_type(x)  # tuple[int, str, str]