Consider if we should use Pydantic to type-check user's arguments to functions

[rht]

Pydantic has a validation decorator used to decorate functions so that the types from argument and return value annotations are enforced: https://docs.pydantic.dev/latest/concepts/validation_decorator/. The V2 has performance improvements that should be considered.

cc: @adamamer20 since mesa-frames has extensive type annotations.

[adamamer20]

I think that's a great idea, I also thought about it for mesa-frames but when i tried with typeguard, there was a significant performance overhead. After we have some examples, we can test out pydantic to see whether the performance hit is noticeable or not.

[rht]

How did you test the performance? Is it by generating the readme_plot output? I want to try Pydantic on mesa-frames.

[adamamer20]

Yeah but it was quite a while ago before the new PRs, and it was more anecdotally than a rigorous test (I don't have any measurement for it). We can definitely try, look also at beartype.

Unlike comparable runtime type-checkers (e.g., pydantic, typeguard), beartype decorates callables with dynamically generated wrappers efficiently type-checking each parameter passed to and value returned from those callables in constant time. Since “performance by default” is our first-class concern, generated wrappers are guaranteed to:

• Exhibit O(1) non-amortized worst-case time complexity with negligible constant factors.
• Be either more efficient (in the common case) or exactly as efficient minus the cost of an additional stack frame (in the worst case) as equivalent type-checking implemented by hand, which no one should ever do.