# Introduction

Mypy is a static type checker for Python. If you sprinkle your code with type annotations, mypy can type check your code and find common bugs. As mypy is a static analyzer, or a lint-like tool, your code’s type annotations are just hints and don’t interfere when running your program. You run your program with a standard Python interpreter, and the annotations are treated primarily as comments.

Using the Python 3 function annotation syntax (using the PEP 484 notation) or a comment-based annotation syntax for Python 2 code, you will be able to efficiently annotate your code and use mypy to check the code for common errors. Mypy has a powerful, easy-to-use, type system with modern features such as type inference, generics, function types, tuple types and union types.

As a developer, you decide how to use mypy in your workflow. You can always escape to dynamic typing as mypy’s approach to static typing doesn’t restrict what you can do in your programs. Using mypy will make your programs easier to debug, maintain, and understand.

This documentation provides a short introduction to mypy. It will help you get started writing statically typed code. Knowledge of Python and a statically typed object-oriented language, such as Java, are assumed.

Note

Mypy is still experimental. There will be changes that break backward compatibility.