Arrow plug-in for IntelliJ 0.1 is here!

One of the main goals of the Arrow project is to produce libraries that follow well-known Kotlin idioms, and we strive to make them as discoverable as possible. Nevertheless, the surface of some components, like typed errors, is quite large. For that reason, we have been busy in the last weeks preparing the first release of the Arrow plug-in for IntelliJ-based IDEs.

This first version already focuses on three different aspects of Arrow usage where we found that an additional companion can make a big difference. The first aspect is the usage of typed errors: the IDE will now suggest missing .bind() or .bindAll(), mapping of error using withError, and promoting idioms like ensure whenever possible.

The second aspect is warning about wrong usages of Arrow APIs which cannot be prevented by Kotlin's type system alone. This includes escaping of Raise contexts -- for example, using sequence or flow inside either --, using Atomic with primitive types -- where AtomicInt or AtomicBoolean should be used instead --, or matching on Eval instances directly instead of using the provided API -- which can easily lead to broken invariants.

The third aspect is applying some known recipes which may be hard to know upfront. The first release includes a suggestion to add the corresponding serializer when a type marked as @Serializable includes an Arrow Core type. This is an area which we would like to explore more, helping with the difficulties raised by the community.

The plug-in lives in a separate repository. Please let us know your experience, and don't be shy to open issues with suggestions for more features. They would help not only you but potentially every user of the Arrow library.