Dialyzer reports "Function has no local return"

[Michael]

For any function in my application, if I make a call to, say, update_counter or clear_counter, dialyzer will report that my application's function has no local return. Removing the call to update_counter or clear_counter causes the dialyzer warning to go away. Why is this?

[Steve Cohen]

Ahh, the famous no local return error.
I'm guessing (and I'm only guessing here, investigation will require a significant amount of work) the reason is that Elixometer doesn't have typespecs, and dialyzer can't correctly perform success typing on these function calls. It's also likely that in some instances, a call to these functions can exit or throw, and not return data.

In practice though, they're pretty safe, as Pinterest and several other companies have been using Elixometer in production for years. I can't remember a single Elixometer related failure during my tenure.

[Jon Parise]

I just added some initial typesepcs in #107.

[Steve Cohen]

🎉

[Steve Cohen]

@building39 I'm going to close this, assuming your problem is fixed. If not, feel free to reopen.