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The last couple years have brought a number of great typecheckers to JavaScript: Facebook’s Flow and Microsoft’s TypeScript have both been hugely successful, and brought some stability to a famously “loose” language.

The same philosophy is now coming to Ruby. Details are still scarce, but Stripe engineers have unveiled a Ruby typechecker at the RubyKaigi conference in Japan, called Sorbet.

Ruby has a reputation for being “magic” — its loose syntax and monkey-patching functionality allows developers to rapidly build powerful applications, but it can also lead to unclear and confusing code. With Sorbet, Ruby developers may have a new opportunity to bring some stability and clarity to their projects.

The obvious question, then, is when will Sorbet be available? According to @nelhage, an engineer at Stripe, work is still very much ongoing, and the project is still designed for internal use at Stripe.