microsoft / microsoft/TypeScript

Feature Request: F# style Type Provider support?

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Needs Proposal Suggestion
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Description

Could we get support for something like F#'s type providers in the future?

Let me present some use case scenarios for this.. Let's suppose you have a TS project trying to access a REST API, and this REST API uses Swagger or RAML for documentation. Well in this case we could have something like this;

var fooClient = new SwaggerClient<"http://foo.com/swagger.json">();
fooClient.getPeople((people) => {
    people.every((person) => console.log(person.firstName + "," + person.lastName);
});

and this could be completely type safe, as the SwaggerClient pulls down the API return types, method names (such as getPeople) and signatures at compile time and exposes them as methods to the type system. I think that's pretty huge. Such clients could be written by the community for RAML, SOAP or what have you.

another nice one:

var doc = new Document<"index.html">()
doc.titleSpan.text = "Hello World!";
doc.myButton.addListener("clicked", () => { console.log("tapped!")});

In this example the Document type provider loads our index.html file and finds all the elements with id's and figures out what types they are, and exposes them in the type system at compile time. Again, I think that's pretty huge!

F# uses Type Providers for all kinds of things, so there's lots of ways this can get used. It's easy to see frameworks figuring out all kinds of amazing things that these could be used for. It also feels like a nice fit for TypeScript because it helps bridge the benefits on dynamic typing with the benefits of static typing.

one more tiny example:

console.log(StringC<"name:%s/tid:%n">("Battlebottle", 128));

a simple string formatter. This reads "name:%s/tid:%n" and knows that %s and %n must be replaced with a string and number respectively, so at compile time it produces a method that accepts a string parameter and a number parameter. Basically a statically typed string formatter. Just a tiny of example of handy little utilities that could be written with this feature. But the opportunity is pretty huge I think in general.

Any thoughts?

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Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points. Start by scoping how compile-time external schemas and literal strings could produce types, then define a concrete proposal and acceptance criteria for one example. The request is broad and is not implementation-ready.

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
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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