Adding variable annotation causes incompatible type when Optional and TypeVars are used

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
compilers

Research direction

Start by running the minimal Python reproducer with mypy and --strict-optional, then trace how the checker infers TypeVars through Optional arguments and variable annotations. The fix is complete when the annotated bar: List[str] example type-checks without the incompatible-type error while the existing examples remain valid.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug false-positive priority-1-normal

Found while playing around with attrs (now in the typeshed) and using --strict-optional:

$ mypy --version
mypy 0.570-dev-f3491a320ffa36e6574c4370489d9f4819d7fa83 (master)

$ python --version
Python 3.6.3

# Run with --strict-optional
from typing import TypeVar, Callable, Optional, List
_T = TypeVar('_T')
def make(typ: Callable[[], _T]) -> _T:
    ...
def accept(arg: Optional[_T]) -> _T:
    ...
accept(make(list))
accept(None)
foo = accept(make(list))                   # This works
bar: List[str] = accept(make(list))    # Argument 1 to "accept" has incompatible type "List[_T]"; expected "Optional[List[str]]"

Note: The real code has more arguments and an overload that handles the None case but I cut it down to the shortest repro.

The attrs version of this code is:

import attr
x: List[str] = attr.ib(attr.Factory(list))
Dominant language
Python
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