microsoft / microsoft/TypeScript

Add Support for design-time decorators

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Description

Now that decorators are supported in TypeScript (#2249), consider adding support for ambient/design-time-only decorators:

Ambient decorators can be an extensible way to declare properties on or associate special behavior to declarations; design time tools can leverage these associations to produce errors or produce documentation. For example:

Use cases:
  • Deprecated/Obsolete, to support warning on use of specific API’s:
interface JQuery {  
    /**  
     * A selector representing selector passed to jQuery(), if any, when creating the original set.  
     * version deprecated: 1.7, removed: 1.9  
     */  
    @@deprecated("Property is only maintained to the extent needed for supporting .live() in the jQuery Migrate plugin. It may be removed without notice in a future version.", false)  
    selector: string;  
}
  • Suppress linter warning:
@@suppressWarning("disallow-leading-underscore")   
function __init() {  
}
Proposal

Design-time (Ambient) decorators are:

  • ambient functions
  • have a special name starting with "@"
  • are not emitted in output JS code, but persisted in .d.ts outputs.

Application

  • Applying a design-time can only accept constant values. Variables would not be observable by the compiler at compile time. Here is the set of possible values:
    • string literal,
    • number literal,
    • regexp literal,
    • true keyword,
    • false keyword,
    • null keyword,
    • undefined symbol,
    • const enum members,
    • array literals of one of the previous kinds,
    • object literal with only properties with values of one of the previous kinds

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading this proposal alongside TypeScript issue #2249 and the existing decorator support. Determine the design for ambient functions, constant-only arguments, and .d.ts preservation; the work is done when design-time decorators are accepted, omitted from JavaScript output, and persisted in declaration output.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
compilers
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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