Parsing with Prism in Sorbet
Emily Samp • October 29, 2024 • online

Sorbet is a gradual type checker for Ruby, and like many Ruby developer tools, it has its own parser. This means that every time a change is made to the Ruby language, teams at Stripe and Shopify need to implement those changes in Sorbet’s parser. This process is labor-intensive, slow, and prone to errors. There must be a better way!

Enter, Prism. Prism is a new Ruby parser developed by Shopify. It is written in C and designed to be embedded in other Ruby tooling. In this talk, I’ll describe how I replaced the existing Sorbet parser with Prism, eliminating the toil of maintaining the Sorbet parser and taking one step toward uniting Ruby’s parsing ecosystem.

WNB.rb Meetup October 2024