Some things we can learn from MonkeyType

[gvanrossum]

Instagram released their competing tool, MonkeyType (blog, docs).

They have more configurability (e.g. type storage, sampling, type rewriting). They use randomization in their profiling hook.

A possibly road to convergence might involve sharing type storage and configuration so you can use either tool to collect types and the other to apply them.

[gvanrossum]

MonkeyType's trace hook keeps track separately of the type of values yielded by generators. (I filed #56 separately for this.)

[johnarnold]

Guido, I've been playing with monkeytype specifically because it supports py3-style annotations. For whatever it's worth, I'd love to see convergence between the two efforts if possible, everyone would benefit. I'd rather contribute to one or the other.

[gvanrossum]

I appreciate everybody's desire to only have a single unified tool. But the reality is that Instagram and Dropbox have very different needs and neither has enough resources to spend a lot of time on unification of the tools. That said, whenever I can easily borrow an idea or code from MonkeyType for PyAnnotate I will happily do it, and I expect the same holds for the Instagram folks. You can even help by submitting PRs that help the tools converge!