I've decided to to try out Pyrefly, Ty and Zuban for their language server features (type checking disabled where possible) last week and found that Zuban is the fastest (but unfortunately doesn't currently have the option to disable type checking). Ty comes next and Pyrefly was surprisingly slow to load (have to wait a few seconds before I can goto definition for example).
They all lack certain features vs basedpyright (what I was using) such as auto imports (Ty has experimental support), showing signature/doc when selecting autocomplete options (I think Ty does have this one) and some other features that I can't remember.
One feature that always existed in Jedi (and now also Zuban) is "goto declaration" in Python. It allowed me to goto the "import" instead of the original definition of a function/class which I'm surprised either isn't supported at all (pyright?) or would just do the same thing as "goto definition" (Ty), seems like an obvious oversight imho.
Edit: Also, I wish all these new tools give more importance to such IDE features as much as they do for type checking.
Hey, Pyrefly developer here, thanks for trying us out!
We're dedicated to providing a great IDE experience, though it does take some time. Please bother us on github / our discord if you have features you want - bug reports / community asks are our biggest priority.
- auto import is implemented in Pyrefly: it uses your pyrefly.toml project structure or falls back to your VSCode workspace (up to the first 2500 files). we're happy to fix it for your situation if you want to provide a reproduction
- speed: by far the biggest issue. your problem is likely related to [this](https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/360) but we need more information to speed it up. we're happy to work with you to to improve this if you're willing to provide a project structure
If ruff & uv have proved anything, it's that a tool that's effortless, a net-positive and fast will get adopted.
New typecheckers don't need to be perfect. They need to be good enough, easy to integrate and have low false positives. Sure, they will improve with time, but if feels like a pain then no one will pick it up. Python users are famously averse to tools that slow down their dev cycles, even if it means better long term stability
BasedPyright is popular because it comes built-in with Cursor and disappears into the background. I have a positive bias towards Astral figuring it out given their track record. But, none of these tools have reached the point of effortlessness just yet.
At least for Ty, not sure about the others, it is explicitly for type checking, exposed as an LSP. It’s not trying to compete with full LSP implementations. Most modern editors let you combine multiple LSPs, you shouldn’t think of them as using only one at a time
Anyone know how this compares to 'ty': a new typechecker from Astral (uv/ruff team), also written in Rust and super fast. I had been waiting on it to reach beta, but would love to move to something faster than pyright sooner if possible.
Python is starting to feel a bit like JavaScript circa 2014. Remember grunt, gulp, webpack, coffeescript, babel? Now we've got pyright, mypy, pyrefly, black, ruff, ty, flake8, poetry, uv...
I used to find this kind of tooling explosion exhausting (and back then with JS it truly was), but generally speaking it's a good sign that the community is hungry to push things forward. Choice is good, as long as we keep the Unix spirit alive: small, composable tools that play nicely together and can be interchanged.
Interestingly besides typescript, javascript in 2025 is still super fragmeneted but by a bunch of well-polished tools that all do approximately the same thing. esbuild/vite(rollup)/trubopack(swc), prettier/biome/oxc, npm/bun/pnpm/yarn, bun/node/deno/worker-runtimes
It's not really that bad. Unless you want to be adventurous you need these tools:
* uv: project management, formatting
* Pyright: type checking
* Pylint: linting (this is probably optional though I would strongly recommend it). Ruff is an option but I don't think it is quite as comprehensive yet.
There are alternatives for those tools but they are pretty clearly the best options at the moment. There's nothing in uv's league, and the only alternatives in Pyright's league is BasedPyright. Hopefully Ty and Pyrefly will be good options in future but I don't think they're ready for production use just yet.
A lot of the tools you list here are composable, mypy checks type hints, black formats code, because of the purpose and design ethos of those two tools they would never think to merge.
So which is it that you want, to just reach for one tool or have tools that have specific design goals and then have to reach for many tools in a full workflow?
FWIW Astral's long term goal appears to be to just reach for one tool, hence why you can now do "uv format".
I've tried pyrefly, ty, pyright, and basedpyright, with a large complex code base written using PyCharm, and _none_ of them do as good a job as PyCharm, particularly in discovering more complex type inheritances. It's a pity because in other respects Zed (which relies on these) is a worthy competitor to PyCharm (and much faster!) -- but the endless squiggly lines because pyrefly can't figure out the type, is annoying (and turning off the warnings is unhelpful).
Hopefully one of these will get up to PyCharm's level (my money would be on ty as Astral is kicking a* these days).
PyCharm has very basic type checking, though. It's not strict.
> pyrefly, ty, pyright, and basedpyright
All of them will complain 2-4x more about your code than PyCharm. I had more than 300 typing errors when I first opened my 20k LOC project in pyright that I wrote in Pycharm.
PyCharm works great when your code is not annotated. It infers types very well. But it won't complain in a lot of cases when your code is annotated.
I don't think these are designed to "discovering" complex type inheritances.
They are designed for code which are more or less fully typed, as opposed to PyCharm which cobbles together a bunch of heuristics to try to make sense out of untyped code. An admirable quest, but not one I'm personally interested in.
And their insistence on only supporting this approach drove my entire team away from using PyCharm.
(From shallowly observing notifications on the 20+ typehint related issues I'm subscribed to, they seem to have kinda turned around and working toward fully supporting the python type system finally - possibly by integrating with one of the third-party type-checkers)
I think the 2nd best IDE for Python for me is Visual Studio proper, not Code. I know it sounds crazy, but Microsoft actually put some effort into their Python integration. Again, its a 2nd best, but that still says a lot about everyone else's editors.
Nowadays I'm finding myself using Zed a lot more, so maybe the story will be that all these nice Rust based tools become baked in giving it super powers for Python.
That's interesting. In my experience basedpyright has been better than pyCharm at every turn. Yes, a lot more warnings but generally sensible. One specific thing I remember pissing me off: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-58665 Still open 2 years later.
Are you talking about with code that has proper type annotations? As I recall PyCharm is about the best you can get if you are working with code that has no type annotations but ... you shouldn't be doing that in 2025! With type annotations I've found Pyright to be 100% rock solid.
I love the speed advantage of pyrefly over (based)pyright but so far it doesn't seem to highlight as much as pyright does, for example it doesn't catch unreachable code like this:
def fn(x: str):
if x is None:
x = "123" # pyright flags that as unreachable code, pyrefly does not
Autocomplete for modules also doesn't work for me yet:
import os
os. # I'll get `ABC, `Any`, `AnyStr`, `AnyStr_co`, `BinaryIO`, ...
Looking forward to have a fast language server for python though, pyright is way too slow for large projects.
Hey, Pyrefly developer here, thanks for trying us out! Thanks for bearing with us with these issues you're experiencing while we're still in alpha.
We're planning on adding unreachable code diagnostics soon (github issue [here](https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/1292)). These come for free with Pyright so we don't want to regress features.
I'm happy to help diagnose/fix your autocomplete issue: it should work on modules. If you want to provide details here, on [discord](https://discord.gg/Cf7mFQtW7W), or as a Github issue (github/discord preferred) we'll fix it for you + anyone else with the problem.
It's funny because in other typed languages a string can be null because of string being a reference type as opposed to a value type. I think Python type hints make more sense than C# does in this respect, which gives me a chuckle (two of my favorite languages and the untyped one makes more sense with types). That said, not sure if you already have but I would add a github issue / ticket reporting your issue to raise awareness to the devs.
Hm, it doesn't seem to be dealing particularly well with imported packages that don't have type annotations. Seeing a bunch of "has no attribute" warnings. Some of the "substitute" annotations also seem to be wrong (e.g. asyncio in CPython has no annotations [in my installed version], but it's pulling some in from somewhere and they're not quite right…) It's also getting confused about lists and tuples in __slots__.
The advantage is type hints can be fixed without needing to release a new version of Python. The disadvantage is there's a lot of code in the standard library that doesn't really consider how to represent it with type hints, and it can be really tricky and not always possible.
I'm surprised to see so many people moving to pyrefly, ty, and zuban so quickly. I was going to wait until some time in 2026 to see which has matured to the point I find useful, I guess some users really find existing solutions actually unworkable.
Though, I'm happy with basedpyright and usually disable type checking. It's great to have so many options in language servers for Python now that pylance is locked to vscode.
Anyone struggling with slow mypy should really update to latest version. This years releases has focused on performance and it has payed off. Add the boost from latest Python versions to that and you can see 50% type checking improvements. Still far from a rust based tool, always something, all without changing your tool chain.
How well does ty work these days? Last time I checked it still produced a lot of false positives and false negatives. (Which was very much expected, given its alpha/WIP status.)
Been using pyrefly since July on a big python build.
It has some things it can’t pick up on - no return after a catch block when all code paths are covered for example - but it’s speedy and the error messages are good enough for Claude to understand and ignore or resolve.
We've seen a lot of people have success with the mypy plugin + django-stubs.
Full out-of-the-box support is being actively worked on in Pyrefly: we will have specialized django enum support in the next release and we expect real experimental support by the end of the year. At that time we'll likely post a blog post to announce it [here](https://pyrefly.org/blog/).
Just started trying ty with django-types. I got the models typed in a day or so. Still wading through the other 200+ errors in my codebase. But it's fast at least.
Another one I recently discovered and that has a very active maintainer is "zuban" or zuban-ls. It has replaced jedi-language-server for me, and aims to replace mypy as well.
Sadly, the question with both this and ty is: Does it support pydantic? If not, then it's not really helpful for many people, and right now AFAIK neither supports pydantic.
Pydantic is probably the problem here, but it is what it is.
Python's type system is the problem here, which cannot support even the native dataclass pattern and needs custom plugins written for each type checker.
sirfz|4 months ago
They all lack certain features vs basedpyright (what I was using) such as auto imports (Ty has experimental support), showing signature/doc when selecting autocomplete options (I think Ty does have this one) and some other features that I can't remember.
One feature that always existed in Jedi (and now also Zuban) is "goto declaration" in Python. It allowed me to goto the "import" instead of the original definition of a function/class which I'm surprised either isn't supported at all (pyright?) or would just do the same thing as "goto definition" (Ty), seems like an obvious oversight imho.
Edit: Also, I wish all these new tools give more importance to such IDE features as much as they do for type checking.
kinto|4 months ago
We're dedicated to providing a great IDE experience, though it does take some time. Please bother us on github / our discord if you have features you want - bug reports / community asks are our biggest priority.
- auto import is implemented in Pyrefly: it uses your pyrefly.toml project structure or falls back to your VSCode workspace (up to the first 2500 files). we're happy to fix it for your situation if you want to provide a reproduction
- signature/doc when selecting autocomplete options is a known bug [here](https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/1090)
- go to declaration: I've created an issue for that [here](https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/1291), it should be quick.
- speed: by far the biggest issue. your problem is likely related to [this](https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/360) but we need more information to speed it up. we're happy to work with you to to improve this if you're willing to provide a project structure
screye|4 months ago
New typecheckers don't need to be perfect. They need to be good enough, easy to integrate and have low false positives. Sure, they will improve with time, but if feels like a pain then no one will pick it up. Python users are famously averse to tools that slow down their dev cycles, even if it means better long term stability
BasedPyright is popular because it comes built-in with Cursor and disappears into the background. I have a positive bias towards Astral figuring it out given their track record. But, none of these tools have reached the point of effortlessness just yet.
jswny|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
scosman|4 months ago
emddudley|4 months ago
HN discussion of above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44107655
How Well Do New Python Type Checkers Conform? A Deep Dive into Ty, Pyrefly, and Zuban (2025-08-29) https://sinon.github.io/future-python-type-checkers/
whalesalad|4 months ago
I used to find this kind of tooling explosion exhausting (and back then with JS it truly was), but generally speaking it's a good sign that the community is hungry to push things forward. Choice is good, as long as we keep the Unix spirit alive: small, composable tools that play nicely together and can be interchanged.
parhamn|4 months ago
IshKebab|4 months ago
* uv: project management, formatting
* Pyright: type checking
* Pylint: linting (this is probably optional though I would strongly recommend it). Ruff is an option but I don't think it is quite as comprehensive yet.
There are alternatives for those tools but they are pretty clearly the best options at the moment. There's nothing in uv's league, and the only alternatives in Pyright's league is BasedPyright. Hopefully Ty and Pyrefly will be good options in future but I don't think they're ready for production use just yet.
notatallshaw|4 months ago
So which is it that you want, to just reach for one tool or have tools that have specific design goals and then have to reach for many tools in a full workflow?
FWIW Astral's long term goal appears to be to just reach for one tool, hence why you can now do "uv format".
lenkite|4 months ago
strangescript|4 months ago
The problem with the python tooling is no one can get it right. There aren't clear winners for a lot of the tooling.
dev_l1x_be|4 months ago
pjmlp|4 months ago
There is a reason us old timers mostly wait on the sidelines until the dust settles.
We have seen this movie already too many times.
brianzelip|4 months ago
insane_dreamer|4 months ago
f311a|4 months ago
> pyrefly, ty, pyright, and basedpyright
All of them will complain 2-4x more about your code than PyCharm. I had more than 300 typing errors when I first opened my 20k LOC project in pyright that I wrote in Pycharm.
PyCharm works great when your code is not annotated. It infers types very well. But it won't complain in a lot of cases when your code is annotated.
Related reddit post https://old.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ajnikt/to_pycharm_...
olejorgenb|4 months ago
They are designed for code which are more or less fully typed, as opposed to PyCharm which cobbles together a bunch of heuristics to try to make sense out of untyped code. An admirable quest, but not one I'm personally interested in.
And their insistence on only supporting this approach drove my entire team away from using PyCharm.
(From shallowly observing notifications on the 20+ typehint related issues I'm subscribed to, they seem to have kinda turned around and working toward fully supporting the python type system finally - possibly by integrating with one of the third-party type-checkers)
giancarlostoro|4 months ago
Nowadays I'm finding myself using Zed a lot more, so maybe the story will be that all these nice Rust based tools become baked in giving it super powers for Python.
unmotivated-hmn|4 months ago
IshKebab|4 months ago
pawelkobojek|4 months ago
kinto|4 months ago
We're planning on adding unreachable code diagnostics soon (github issue [here](https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/1292)). These come for free with Pyright so we don't want to regress features.
I'm happy to help diagnose/fix your autocomplete issue: it should work on modules. If you want to provide details here, on [discord](https://discord.gg/Cf7mFQtW7W), or as a Github issue (github/discord preferred) we'll fix it for you + anyone else with the problem.
giancarlostoro|4 months ago
parhamn|4 months ago
veber-alex|4 months ago
Looks like none of these new type checkers are ready yet.
eqvinox|4 months ago
notatallshaw|4 months ago
You can take a look yourself if you think some of them are wrong: https://github.com/python/typeshed/tree/main/stdlib/asyncio
The advantage is type hints can be fixed without needing to release a new version of Python. The disadvantage is there's a lot of code in the standard library that doesn't really consider how to represent it with type hints, and it can be really tricky and not always possible.
I'm surprised to see so many people moving to pyrefly, ty, and zuban so quickly. I was going to wait until some time in 2026 to see which has matured to the point I find useful, I guess some users really find existing solutions actually unworkable.
bobajeff|4 months ago
sheepscreek|4 months ago
whilenot-dev|4 months ago
Too|4 months ago
rasulkireev|4 months ago
codethief|4 months ago
cadamsdotcom|4 months ago
It has some things it can’t pick up on - no return after a catch block when all code paths are covered for example - but it’s speedy and the error messages are good enough for Claude to understand and ignore or resolve.
Recommended!
natdempk|4 months ago
I've been leaning on pyright + django-stubs, but wondering if I'm missing something better with fewer gaps and pain points.
kinto|4 months ago
We've seen a lot of people have success with the mypy plugin + django-stubs.
Full out-of-the-box support is being actively worked on in Pyrefly: we will have specialized django enum support in the next release and we expect real experimental support by the end of the year. At that time we'll likely post a blog post to announce it [here](https://pyrefly.org/blog/).
nprateem|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
zelphirkalt|4 months ago
f311a|4 months ago
- zuban
- ty (from ruff team)
- pyrefly
One year ago, we had none of them, only slow options.
rana762|4 months ago
[deleted]
flanked-evergl|4 months ago
Pydantic is probably the problem here, but it is what it is.
ocamoss|4 months ago
mixmastamyk|4 months ago
phailhaus|4 months ago