How is it that new Julia programmers tend to abuse type annotations?

[nsajko]

@nsajko

Probably you’re using some package (possibly indirectly), that defines an (imperfect) method for Base.string. Hard to tell without more information, but I can tell you this: when starting a fresh Julia REPL, for all of Julia v1.9, v1.10 and nightly (future v1.11), all methods infer as either String or AbstractString. This is the command: Base.return_types(string, Tuple{Any}) (the entries correspond to the output of methods).

Relevant PR: improve return type inference for `string` by nsajko · Pull Request #52806 · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub

Relevant Discourse topic (potential Julia bug?): Why is `Base.return_types(String, Tuple{AbstractVector{UInt8}})` so pessimistic for this method?

@joa-quim @Benny