Design Meeting Notes, 3/19/2024

[DanielRosenwasser]

Preserving attributes on reference directives

https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/pull/57681

• Should we strip away preserve="true"?
  • Would that break .d.ts bundlers?
    • We don't know.
  • Current declaration emitter just generates new directives.
  • We like preserving the text as a principle.
    • Not that simple though, lots of stuff already rewrites.
  • Also like the fact that you can copy/paste from a .d.ts and get the same behavior.
• Also, we should fix the TmLanguage files to understand the attributes.

Reallowing Infinity, -Infinity, NaN as enum member names

Background

https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/pull/56161 https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/57845

• Years ago, we had a principle that enums could not have numeric names.
• no enum E { "10" = 42 }
• because of enum E { "10" = 42, yadda = 10 } which breaks the reverse mapping.
• That is, E[10] maps to yadda not 42
• But people want to have enum members named Infinity or NaN
• Which we allowed because it was popular.
• But it could still cause problems in enum E { Infinity = 1, yadda = 1/0 }.
• But if you don't have any enum initialisers equal to Infinity, what's the problem?
• But we can't statically analyse this.
• Maybe it works for some enums though? In particular, string enums.

Proposal

• Not really, we need a stricter rule:
  • All the values are known.
  • None of them conflict with member names.
• Or:
  • If all the values are strings.

Discussion

• You can't actually have bare numbers -- you have to quote them.
• Reverse mappings were a mistake. We shouldn't do more.
• Would we be doing reverse mapping for string-only enums with this?
• If it's string-only, it would be OK because there would be no reverse mapping.
• If enum E { yadda = 'yadda' } had a reverse mapping, it would overwrite the reverse mapping. And Red = 'Red' is super common.
• But wait. Reverse mappings are not a thing in string-only enums.
• The string-only rule seems fine.
• Shipping a simple revert as a 5.4 patch wouldn't be good enough, so this should wait till 5.5.
• No wait: we will revert the PR for 5.4 and ship the better rule in 5.5.

Narrowing element accesses with non-constant expressions

https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/pull/57847

• Long time there's been a desire from us to narrow computed-but-effectively constant values.
• Once you've proven something about obj[key] and you change neither obj nor key, the type system really should understand that!
• Previously couldn't do this because typically the whole issue was that key was often a parameter, or varied within a loop variable.
  • But now we already have control flow analysis of parameters and let variables that don't actually mutate (and captured variables that don't mutate after a certain point).

• Not everything "lights up" the way you'd think.

  function f(obj: object, key: string) {
  if (key in obj) {
      obj[key]; // not allowed right now
  }
  }

  • Can't make this work right because we don't consider obj to be indexable.
  • In a sense you want obj to have the type object & Record<unique typeof key, unknown>. Really wouldn't want obj to be indexable with all strings, just key itself.
  • Manufacture a type variable/existential for key.
• No baseline changes or issues in the top 200.
• We saw a slight bit of slowdown in compiler-unions.
  • Mostly within the noise.

[DanielRosenwasser]

57853 contains the revert.

[ehoogeveen-medweb]

Last section is about https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/pull/57847 :)

[DanielRosenwasser]

Thanks for catching that! Updated

[fatcerberus]

The discussion about enum reverse mappings reads like an account of a game of tug-of-war, and then at the end nobody wins - the rope goes slack and both teams fall in the mud 😝