typecheck-decorator

Lutz Prechelt, 2014-2016, for Version 1.3

A decorator for functions, @tc.typecheck, to be used together with Python3 annotations on function parameters and function results. The decorator will perform dynamic argument type checking for every call to the function.

1 Introduction: A quick example

@tc.typecheck
def foo1(a:int, b=None, c:str="mydefault") -> bool :
    print(a, b, c)
    return b is not None and a != b

The parts :int, :str, and -> bool are annotations. This is a syntactic feature introduced in Python 3 where : (for parameters) and -> (for results) are delimiters and the rest can be an arbitrary expression. It is important to understand that, as such, annotations do not have any semantics whatsoever. There must be explicit Python code somewhere that looks at them and does something in order to give them a meaning.

The @tc.typecheck decorator gives the above annotations the following meaning: foo1's argument a must have type int, b has no annotation and can have any type whatsoever, it will not be checked, c must have type string, and the function's result must be either True (not 17 or "yes" or [3,7,44] or some such) or False (not 0 or None or [] or some such) -- unless you've done unspeakable things and made Python believe in other than those two time-tested boolean values.

Given these annotations, the arguments supplied in any call to foo1 will (roughly speaking) be evaluated with the type() function and the result compared to the annotated type.

If any argument has the wrong type, a TypeCheckError exception will be raised. Class types and collection types can be annotated as well, but that is by far not the end of the story, because in this package a "type" can be any constraint on the set of allowable values.

2 Import style, usage style

For clarity, the recommended import style is as follows:

import typing as tg
import typecheck as tc

The remainder of this document will assume this import style. (Beware of from typecheck import * , as there are functions any() and all() that are likely to break your code then.)

As for usage style, the idea of this package is not to approximate static type checking. Rather, you should use @tc.typecheck where appropriate ("gradual typing"). Good examples for such situations might be:

• You want to clarify your own thinking at module design time.
• Some callers of your package tend to be careless or ignorant and you want to make their contract violations explicit to reduce hassle.
• You want to safeguard against mistakes when modifying legacy code, so you add some typechecks first.
• You want to record the results of heroic reverse-engineering of legacy code.
• You want to minimize non-code documentation.

Some of your functions and methods will have annotations, many others will not. And even for decorated functions and methods, only a subset of their parameters may be annotated. Where appropriate.

3 How it works

At function definition time, the @tc.typecheck decorator converts each annotation into a predicate function (called a Checker) and stores all of these in the wrapper function.

At function execution time, the wrapper will take each argument supplied to the function call, submit it to its corresponding Checker predicate (if that exists), and raise an exception if the Checker returns False. The original function will be called then and its result checked likewise if a result annotation had been provided.

4 The five sorts of annotation

@tc.typecheck allows four different kinds of annotation to some parameter PAR:

• Types. The annotation is an expression returning a type, typically just the name of a type.
• Predicates. The annotation is a function that turns the argument into True (for an acceptable argument) or False (for all others). (Remember that a predicate is a function, not a function call -- but it may be the result of a function call.)
• Tuples and Lists. The annotation is a tuple or list (rather than a type or a predicate) as explained below.
• Dictionaries. The annotation is a dictionary (rather than a type or a predicate) as explained below.
• typing annotations. The annotation is one of those defined in the module typing. (This module was introduced in Python 3.5 and is available from PyPI for earlier Python 3 versions. We will subsequently often call it tg.) This is a special case of 'Types' introduced above. It requires special handling internally and provides extended possibilities externally (e.g. describing generic functions or specifying container types with particular content types in a manner possibly understood by static type checking tools). These are expected to become the standard over time because more tools and more programmers will readily understand them than the proprietary annotations.

The following subsections explain each of these annotation types. The same annotations are valid for function results (as opposed to parameters) as well.

4.1 Types as annotations

The annotation is an expression for which inspect.isclass evaluates to True, but which is not from the tg module.

Example:

@tc.typecheck
def foo2(a:int, d:dict, l:list=None) -> datetime.datetime :
  pass

Instead of a type name, this could of course also be a function call returning a type or the name of a variable that holds a type. Such function calls will occur only once at function definition time. (Static type checkers may not understand them.)

Meaning: If the annotation declares type T, the argument x must fulfil isinstance(x, T), so objects from subclasses of T are acceptable as well. This same rule, that subclasses are also acceptable, holds for the other annotation types as well.

4.2 Predicates as annotations

The annotation evaluates to a function (or in fact any callable) that will be called with the argument x supplied for parameter PAR as its only argument and must return a value that evaluates to True (for an acceptable argument x) or False (for all other x).

Example:

def is_even(n): return type(n) is int and n%2 == 0

@tc.typecheck
def foo3(a:int) -> is_even :
  return 2*a

You can define your own predicate as shown above or use one of the predicate generators supplied with the package to create a predicate on the fly. (Static type checkers will usually not understand predicates.)

4.3 Tuples and lists as annotations

The annotation is an expression that evaluates to a tuple or list (rather than a type or a predicate); more precisely, it can be any collections.Sequence object. This is a very pragmatic extension for programs that do not model every little data structure as a class but rather make heavy use of the built-in sequence types. (Static type checkers will usually not understand such annotations.)

This is easiest explained by examples:

@tc.typecheck
def foo4(pair:(int,int), descriptor:[int, float, float, bool]):
  pass
foo4((1,2), [3, 2.0, 77.0, True])    # OK
foo4([1,2], [3, 2.0, 77.0, True])    # OK: list is acceptable as tuple
foo4((1,2), (3, 2.0, 77.0, True))    # Wrong: descriptor must be list
foo4((1,2,3), [3, 2.0, 77.0, True])  # Wrong: pair too long
foo4((0.0,2), [3, 2.0, 77.0, True])  # Wrong: pair[0] type mismatch
foo4((1,2), None)                    # Wrong: descriptor is missing

@tc.typecheck
def foo5(pair:(int,int), descriptor:[int, (float, float), bool]):
  pass
foo5((1,2), [3, (2.0, 77.0), True])  # OK
foo5([1,2], [3, 2.0, 77.0, True])    # Wrong: descriptor[1] type mismatch

General meaning:

• The annotation is a sequence of length N. Its entries could themselves each serve as an annotation.
• The annotation will match only an argument of exactly length N.
• The argument's i-th element must fulfil the condition implied by the annotation's i-th element.
• If the annotation is a list, the argument must be a list (or list subclass) object.
• If it is a tuple, the argument can be a tuple, tuple subclass object, list, or list subclass object.
• If it is a subclass S of list or tuple, the same rules apply, except only S and its subclasses are acceptable and the plain-tuple-can-be-list special case does no longer apply.

collections.namedtuple classes produce tuple objects, so you can pass named tuples as arguments for methods having Sequence annotations without problem. Do not use a named tuple for an annotation, though, because its names will be ignored, which is confusing and error-prone. (You can use a namedtuple type as an annotation without problems.)

4.4 Dictionaries as annotations

The annotation is an expression that evaluates to a dictionary (rather than a type or a predicate); more precisely, it can be any collections.Mapping object. Again, this is a pragmatic extension for programs that do not model every little data structure as a class but rather make heavy use of the built-in types. The annotation prescribes a fixed set of keys and a type for the value of each key. All keys must be present. (Static type checkers will usually not understand such annotations.)

Examples:

@tc.typecheck
def foo6(point:dict(x=int,y=int)):
  pass
foo6(dict(x=1, y=2))         # OK
foo6({"x":1, "y":2})         # OK
foo6(collections.UserDict(x=1, y=2))  # OK
foo6(dict(x=1))              # Wrong: key y is missing
foo6(dict(x=1, y="huh?"))    # Wrong: type error for y
foo6(dict(x=1, y=2, z=10))   # Wrong: key z is not allowed

4.5 typing annotations

After the typecheck-decorator package had existed for a while, Python 3.5 standardized a notation for type annotations via the new module typing. That notation is supported here as well. If you do use an older version than Python 3.5, get the typing module from PyPI.

If you only use typecheck-decorator, you can freely mix these new notation with the older notations described above. If you also want to apply other tools with your typechecking annotations (e.g. tools for static typechecking), those will be more helpful if you restrict yourself to the notations described in Sections 4.1 and 4.5 only.

Examples:

import typing as tg
@tc.typecheck
def foo7(point: tg.Tuple[int, int]):
  pass
foo7((4, 2))         # OK
foo7(None)           # Wrong, must use tg.Optional[tg.Tuple[int,int]]
foo7((4, 2, 0))      # Wrong
foo7((4, 2.0))       # Wrong
foo7((4, None))      # Wrong

See the following places for documentation and examples of the possibilities:

• The API documentation of the typing module.
• PEP 484
• the file tc.test_tg_annotations.py However, so far the implementation of this support is not yet complete; see Section "Limitations" for the remaining gaps. If you have been using tc for a while already or if you prefer its proprietary notation over that of tg, be aware that there is one feature in tg that is more powerful than previously available in tc: tg.TypeVar (type variables). It is presumably (I have not tested this much, so there may be gaps) possible to mix standard tg and proprietary tg style annotations freely, including type variables.

5 Predicate generators

Annotating type names (other than those from tg) and fixed-length tuples does not get you very far, because

• such an annotation will not accept None;
• wherever you use duck typing, your "type" is defined by a set of signatures rather than a fixed name;
• you often would like to check for things such as "a list of strings" for arbitrary-length lists.

So you will frequently need to use a predicate to do your checking. Implementing these each time would be cumbersome, so this package comes along with a good basic library of such things. To be useful, these "things" actually have to be predicate generators: Higher-order functions that return a predicate when called. But do not worry, their use looks perfectly straightforward eventually.

5.1 Built-in predicate generators

One of these, optional, you will surely need; all others are a bit more specialized. As any annotation, all of them can be used for parameters and results alike. Here we go:

tc.optional(annot):

Takes any other annotation annot. Allows all arguments that annot allows, plus None:

@tc.typecheck
def foo(a:int):
  pass
@tc.typecheck
def foo_opt(a:tc.optional(int)):
  pass
foo(123)       # OK
foo_opt(123)   # OK
foo(None)      # Wrong: None does not have type int
foo_opt(None)  # OK

An equivalent alternative is tg.Optional[annot].

tc.hasattrs(*names):

Type-checked duck-typing: Takes a variable number of strings containing attribute names. Allows all arguments that possess every one of those attributes.

class FakeIO:
    def write(self):  pass
    def flush(self):  pass
@tc.typecheck
def foo_re(a: tc.hasattrs("write", "flush")):  pass

foo(FakeIO())       # OK
del FakeIO.flush
foo(FakeIO())       # Wrong, because flush attribute is now missing

tc.re(regexp):

Takes a string containing a regular expression. Allows all arguments that are strings and contain (as per re.search) what is described by that regular expression. Also works for bytestrings if you use a bytestring regular expression.

@tc.typecheck
def foo(hexnumber: tc.re("^[0-9A-F]+$")) -> tc.re("^[0-9]+$"):
    return "".join(reversed(k))

foo("1234")        # OK
foo("12AB")        # Wrong: argument OK, but result not allowed

tc.seq_of(annot, checkonly=4):

Takes any other annotation annot. Allows any argument that is a sequence (tuple or list, in fact any collections.Sequence) in which each element is allowed by annot. Not all violations will be detected because, for efficiency reasons, the check will cover only a sample of checkonly elements of the sequence. This sample always includes the first and last element, the rest is a random sample. As an interesting special case, consider submitting a string to a parameter declared as tc.seq_of(str). A string is a sequence. Its elements are strings. So the call should be considered OK. Since this is usually not what you want, tc.seq_of() will always reject a string argument in order to avoid a confusing type of mistake.

@tc.typecheck
def foo_so(s: tc.seq_of(str)):  pass

foo_so(["a", "b"])         # OK
foo_so(("a", "b"))         # OK, a tuple
foo_so([])                 # OK
foo_so(["a"])              # OK
foo_so("a")                # Wrong: not a sequence in seq_of sense
foo_so(["a", 1])           # Wrong: inhomogeneous
almost_ok = 1000*["a"] + [666]
foo_so(almost_ok)          # Wrong: inhomogeneous, will fail
almost_ok += ["a"]
foo_so(almost_ok)          # Wrong, but will fail only 0.25% of the time

An equivalent alternative with fixed checkonly is tg.Sequence[annot].

tc.list_of(annot, checkonly=4):

Just like seq_of(annot, checkonly), except that it requires the sequence to be a collections.MutableSequence.

@tc.typecheck
def foo_lo(s: tc.list_of(str)):  pass

foo_so(["a", "b"])         # OK
foo_so(("a", "b"))         # Wrong: a tuple is not a MutableSequence

An equivalent alternative with fixed checkonly is tg.MutableSequence[annot].

tc.map_of(keys_annot, values_annot, checkonly=4):

Takes two annotations keys_annot and values_annot. Allows any argument that is a collections.Mapping (typically a dict) in which each key is allowed by keys_annot and each value is allowed by values_annot. Not all violations will be detected because for efficiency reasons, the check will cover only the first checkonly pairs returned by the mapping's iterator. In contrast to tc.seq_of, this sample is not a variable random sample.

@tc.typecheck
def foo_do(map: tc.map_of(int, str)) -> tc.map_of(str, int):
    return { v: k  for k,v in x.items() }

assert foo({1: "one", 2: "two"}) == {"one": 1, "two": 2}  # OK
foo({})             # OK: an empty dict is still a dict
foo(None)           # Wrong: None is not a dict
foo({"1": "2"})     # Wrong: violates values_annot of arg and keys_annot of result

An equivalent alternative with fixed checkonly is tg.Mapping[annot].

tc.enum(*values):

Takes any number of arguments. Allows any argument that is equal to any one of them (as opposed to being an instance of one). Effectively defines an arbitrary, ad-hoc enumeration type.

@tc.typecheck
def foo_ev(arg: tc.enum(1, 2.0, "three", [1]*4)): pass

foo_ev(1)     # OK
foo_ev(2*1.0) # OK
foo_ev("thr"+2*"e")  # OK
foo_ev([1,1,1,1])    # OK
foo_ev(1.0)   # OK, because 1.0 == 1
foo_ev("thr") # Wrong: not in values list
foo_ev([1,1]) # Wrong: not in values list

tc.range(low, high):

Takes two limit values low and high that must both have the same type (typically int or float). Will allow all arguments having that same type and lying between (including) low and high. The type needs not be numeric: any type supporting le and ge with range semantics will do.

@tc.typecheck
def foo(arg: tc.range(0.0, 100.0)): pass

foo(0.0)    # OK
foo(8.4e-3) # OK
foo(100.0)  # OK
foo(1)      # Wrong: not a float
foo(111.0)  # Wrong: value too large

tc.any(*annots):

Takes any number of arguments, each being a valid annotation. Allows any argument that is allowed by any one of those annotations. Effectively defines an arbitrary union type. You could think of it as an n-ary or.

@tc.typecheck
def foo_any(arg: tc.any(int, float, tc.matches("^[0-9]+$")): pass

foo_any(1)     # OK
foo_any(2.0)   # OK
foo_any("3")   # OK
foo_any("4.0") # Wrong: not allowed by any of the three partial types

An equivalent alternative is tg.Union[*annots].

tc.all(*annots):

Takes any number of arguments, each being a valid annotation. Allows any argument that is allowed by every one of those annotations. Effectively defines an arbitrary intersection type. You could think of it as an n-ary and.

def complete_blocks(arg):
    return len(arg) % 512 == 0

@tc.typecheck
def foo_all(arg: tc.all(tc.any(bytes,bytearray), complete_blocks)): pass

foo_all(b"x" * 512)              # OK
foo_all(bytearray(b"x" * 1024))  # OK
foo_all("x" * 512)      # Wrong: not a bytearray or bytes
foo_all(b"x" * 1012)    # Wrong: no complete blocks

tc.none(*annots):

Takes any number of arguments, each being a valid annotation. Allows any argument that is allowed by no single one of those annotations. Effectively defines a type taboo. You could think of it as "not any" or as "all not".

class TestCase:
    pass
class MyCheckers(TestCase):
    pass
class AddressTest:
    pass

def classname_contains_Test(arg):
   return type(arg).__name__.find("Test") >= 0

@tc.typecheck
def no_tests_please(arg: tc.none(TestCase, classname_contains_Test)): pass

no_tests_please("stuff")        # OK
no_tests_please(TestCase())     # Wrong: not wanted here
no_tests_please(MyCheckers())   # Wrong: superclass not wanted here
no_tests_please(AddressTest())  # Wrong: suspicious class name

5.2 Built-in fixed predicates

Note that these must be used without parentheses: You need to submit the function, not call it.

tc.anything:

This is the null typecheck: Will accept any value whatsoever, including None. The meaning is effectively the same as attaching no annotation at all, but explicitly declaring that no restrictions are intended may be desirable for pythonic clarity. Note: This is equivalent to tc.all(), that is, all-of-nothing, and also equivalent to tc.none(), that is, none-of-nothing, but is much clearer.

@tc.typecheck
def foo_any(arg: tc.anything) --> tc.anything:
    pass

foo_any(None)             # OK
foo_any([[[[{"one":True}]]]]])  # OK
foo_any(foo_any)          # OK

An equivalent alternative is tg.Any.

callable

The Python builtin predicate callable() is also useful as a typechecking predicate.

@tc.typecheck
def foo_callable(func: callable, msg: str):
    func(msg)

foo_callable(print)      # OK
foo_callable(open)       # OK
foo_callable("print")    # Wrong

Once supported (so far it is not), a much more powerful alternative for callables with fixed signatures will be tg.Callable[[*argtype_annots], returntype_annot].

5.3 Custom predicate generators

If the above library of generators is insufficient for your needs, just write the missing ones yourself: A predicate generator is simply a function that returns an anonymous function with effectively the following signature:

def mypredicate(the_argument: tc.anything) -> bool

No extension API is required.

Here is an example:

# defining a custom predicate generator:
def blocks(blocksize: int) -> bool :
   def bytes_with_blocksize(arg):
      """ensures the arg is a bytearray with the given block size"""
      return (isinstance(arg, bytes) or isinstance(arg, bytearray)) and
             len(arg) % blocksize == 0
   return bytes_with_blocksize

# using the custom predicate generator:
@tc.typecheck
def transfer(mydata: blocks(512)):  pass

6 Exceptions

• If an argument does not fulfil the corresponding parameter annotation, a tc.InputParameterError will be raised.

• If a function result does not fulfil the corresponding annotation, a tc.ReturnValueError will be raised.

• Both of these are subclasses of tc.TypeCheckError.

• If an annotation is used that does not fit into the categories described above, a tc.TypeCheckSpecificationError will be raised at function definition time.

7 Efficiency considerations

@tc.typecheck may appear to be expensive in terms of runtime, but actually Python is doing shiploads of similar things all the time.

There are essentially two cases where execution time will become a real issue:

• An annotation on a trivial function that is being called frequently in a tight loop.
• Checking the types of every element of a large data structure, when only few of those elements will actually be accessed.

Limitations

• There is currently no support for
  • tg.Callable (*)
  • tg.io (*)
  • tg.re (*)
  • decorator @tg.no_type_check
  • PEP 484 "type comments" For those marked (*), support will follow in a future version.
• Python 3 has no unbound methods anymore, therefore binding of type variables to instances of a generic class C will only be recognized heuristically: The first parameter of each method m involved must be named self and the first argument of stand-alone functions must not be named self.
• Type variables can only be bound to types, not to type checking predicates.
• Type variables follow an "observed common supertype" semantics. This means that when a type variable is checked against several different types over time, it will bind to the type first seen, then accept that type as well as its subclasses, and will later rebind if checked against a superclass. It will reject only values that are neither subclass nor superclass values of the current binding (but bounds and constraints are obeyed). This is the most sensible semantics I could think of, but may appear overly liberal in some situations.
• There is a bug in the combination of at least Python 3.4 with PyPI typing 3.5.0.1 that makes e.g. issubclass(tg.Iterable, tg.Generic) false (on the other hand, issubclass(tg.Sequence, tg.Iterable) is true as it should). The full implications for type checking Generics are unclear, expect some Generics type checks to perhaps go wrong in this configuration.
• The contents of tg.Generic containers are checked only in the following cases:
  • subtypes of tg.Sequence with exactly 1 generic parameter: will check the first element, last element, and two random elements.
  • subtypes of tg.Mapping with exactly 2 generic parameters: will check the first four pairs returned by items().
  • other subtypes of tg.Iterable: will check the first four elements.
• Complex tg.Generic cases can sometimes not be content-checked, because tg currently has no mechanism for determining the meaning of the type variables involved. For instance, tg.ItemsView has three generic parameters (tg.T_co, tg.KT, tg.VT_co), the first of which represents the tg.Tuple[tg.KT, tg.VT_co] returned by each call to the iterator -- but how, in general (that is, for user-defined types), is a poor type checker to know this?
• Contrary to PEP 484, a default argument value of None does not yet modify type X to become tg.Optional[X] (although using tg.get_type_hints() for the implementation would purportedly make that easy).
• PEP 484 forward references must so far use simple names (such as 'MyClass'), not qualified ones (such as 'mymodule.MyClass'). The class thus referenced may live wherever it pleases. The forward reference string needs not be evaluable at the point of the checked function call. Types are checked by name comparison, not by evaluation. This means an argument of the wrong type will pass the check if that wrong type has the same base name as the intended type. Support for qualified names may or may not be added in a future version. Checking by evaluation may or may not be added in a future version.
• This module does not follow Section "The numeric tower" of PEP 484, which suggests to accept int where float is annotated. For us, these two are (so far) considered incompatible and you will need to annotate numbers.Float if you want it mix them.
• Likewise, bytearray and memoryview are not currently acceptable where bytes is declared; you currently need to use tg.ByteString to mix those.
• PEP 484 tg.cast does currently not check anything. (As long as the claim formulated by the cast is correct, this is sufficient.)
• The module does not read PEP 484 stub files. (Typechecking large parts of in particular the builtins would create performance problems anyway.)
• The module does not support the @overload decorator. If @overload is used, only the last declaration executed for a name survives, whether it is decorated or not.
• The proprietary annotations described in Sections 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4 of the present document do not currently conform to PEP 484, because they result in functions rather than types; see "What about existing uses of annotations?" in PEP 484. If you are not interested in static type checking, you can use them anyway. A future version will likely convert them such that they result in types.
• The @tc.typecheck decorator will effectively modify the Python-visible signature of the decorated function: Essentially, the resulting signature is always (*args, **kwargs). This will perhaps one day be changed by using the decorator package or a similar technique.
• The exception messages should be more specific, e.g. for sequences and dicts and in particular where type variable violations are involved.

Version history

• 0.1b: 2012, Original version typecheck3000.py by Dmitry Dvoinikov [email protected]. See http://www.targeted.org/python/recipes/typecheck3000.py

• 0.2b: 2014-03-20, prepared by Lutz Prechelt.

  • Added documentation.
  • Fixed a number of errors in the tests that did not foresee that annotations will be checked in a random order.
  • Added setup.py.
  • Replaced the not fully thought-through interpretation of iterables by a more specialized handling of tuples and lists.
  • Renamed several of the predicate generators. First version that was packaged and uploaded to PyPI. Expect the API to change!

• 0.3b: 2014-03-21

  • Renamed either_value to enum
  • Renamed either_type to any
  • Renamed matches to has and made it use re.search, not re.match
  • Introduced all and none
  • Introduced a post-installation self-test, because I am not yet sure whether it will work on other platforms and with other Python versions Feedback is welcome!

• 1.0: 2015-01-28

  • removed tuple_of
  • renamed sequence_of to seq_of and generalized it to collections.Sequence
  • added special case: a str will no longer be considered a seq_of(str)
  • generalized list_of to collections.Sequence
  • renamed dict_of to map_of and generalized it to collections.Mapping
  • renamed regexp matching from 'has' to 're'
  • added checkonly limit to seq_of, list_of, and map_of
  • added Mapping annotations (analogous to Sequence annotations)
  • added range
  • provided the predicates with appropriate name attributes

• 1.1:

  • various small improvements to the documentation

• 1.2:

  • FIX: added checking for non-kwonlyargs named arguments
  • cut the implementation and tests into several pieces

• 1.3:

  • introduces support for annotations according to the Python 3.5 typing module; see Sections 4.5 and "Limitations"
  • an awkward exception rule has been dropped: you can no longer pass a collections.namedtuple value to an argument annotated with a fixed mapping.

Further contributors

Benjamen Keroack [email protected] (v1.1: PyPy test fixes, seq_of(str) hint) Andres Osorio [email protected] (v1.2: keyword args checking fix)

Similar packages

• typecheck3 is based on the same original code of Dmitry Dvoinikov as typecheck-decorator, but (as of 0.1.0) lacks the tests, corrections, documentation, and API improvements available here.
• gradual has a similar overall approach of using a decorator and annotations. Compared to gradual, typecheck-decorator uses a more pragmatic approach and is far more flexible in expressing types. gradual as of 2015-12 has status "pre-alpha".
• threecheck is similar to typecheck-decorator in approach and expressiveness, except it has (as of v1.0) no support for the typing module.