Over the past decade, machine learning (ML) has been applied successfully to a variety of tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. Motivated by this, in recent years, researchers have employed ML techniques to solve code-related problems, including but not limited to, code completion, code generation, program repair, and type inference.
Dynamic programming languages like Python and TypeScript allows developers to optionally define type annotations and benefit from the advantages of static typing such as better code completion, early bug detection, and etc. However, retrofitting types is a cumbersome and error-prone process. To address this, we propose Type4Py, an ML-based type auto-completion for Python. It assists developers to gradually add type annotations to their codebases. In the following, I describe Type4Py’s pipeline, model, deployments, and the development of its VSCode extension and more.