Comment by insane_dreamer
13 hours ago
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.
Related reddit post https://old.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ajnikt/to_pycharm_...
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.