jeremyjh
Dialyxir Pretty Printing: All your errors are belong to us (please)!
Hi everyone,
Andrew Summers has been working on a feature for dialyxir that among other things will Elixirfy the Erlang term representations - in particular this will improve the readability of structs in dialyzer warnings. It also gives us the ability to tweak or expand on the wording of the messages.
Ideally we’d have a test suite based on a corpus of real-world warning messages - but that doesn’t really exist to my knowledge. This is at the point though that alpha testing would be helpful to identify cases where types are not parsed when they could be or fail when attempted.
If you’d like to help out, and your project is already using Elixir 1.6 (we rely on this to help with pretty printing) you can update your mix.exs to use this branch:
{:dialyxir, git: "https://github.com/jeremyjh/dialyxir", branch: "elixir-formatter", runtime: false}
If parsing fails with an exception dialyxir should automatically print the message using :dialyzer formatter (like it the released version does today). If that happens please post about it in the PR.
Also there is a new command line option --raw - if you see output that you think doesn’t look good or doesn’t parse things that want for parsing, please re-run with mix dialyzer --raw and post the output tuples to that PR.
Thanks in advance!
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jeremyjh
This feature has merged to master - I really want to thank Andrew for all the work he’s put into this.
Also, I wanted to mention another feature Andrew added, which is --explain - this contains help text about what the class of warning means. So mix dialyzer --explain no_return will now do exactly that. Suggestions / improvements to this learning resource would be greatly appreciated.
jeremyjh
I’ve published a release candidate to hex:
{:dialyxir, "~> 1.0.0-rc.0", only: [:dev], runtime: false}
We also made a minor API change from the preview, dialyzer.explain is a new top-level task that replaces --explain and --list.
asummers
Thank you everyone for your bug reports and patience as I fixed them 
Please make issues with any unclear language or issues you might still be having! I think the output is substantially more readable, and encourage you to play around with it. The --format short option is particularly nice for CI pipelines.
axelson
But from an output like:
apps/web_interface/lib/web_interface/controllers/api/page_controller.ex:47:no_return
Function join/2 has no local return.
How is a user supposed know that maps no_return maps to Dialyxir.Warnings.NoReturn?
jeremyjh
Hi, we are really close, but have had a few issues slowly trickling in. The plan is to push another RC tomorrow and a final 1.0.0 a week from tomorrow (July 6th).
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