Ruby Contracts: Best of Both Worlds

Among the many flame-wars in the developer community is the one about typing: static vs. dynamic.

In Ruby, we can have the best of both worlds, via gem contracts.

I was going to write about this powerful and flexible gem here, but on second thought will just link to this excellent page by the gem's author.

Comments

[Phil Nash]

I'd be interested to hear your experiences with the gem. Have you found it makes it easier to write applications? Do you write fewer tests? Do you use it everywhere in a codebase or only in particular places?

[Burdette Lamar]

Thanks, Phil.

Using contracts makes it easier to catch bugs earlier: type error is caught immediately rather than further downstream where it's harder to debug.

For my large-scale in-house test frameworks, I've used it throughout.

For code that will become a gem, though, I don't use it, because it creates a dependency that the potential user might find unacceptable.