microsoft / microsoft/TypeScript

better autocompletion for dicriminated union as tuples

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Experience Enhancement Suggestion
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Description

Search Terms

autocompletion, tuple, tagged union

Suggestion

Use Cases

https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced-types.html#discriminated-unions
Discriminated unions of tuples is just the same in semantic with discriminated unions with object introduced in the official document of typescript.
And the type check for it is working correctly for now.
But the autocompletion for tuples isn't as powerful as one for objects.
Sometimes discriminate unions as objects are verbose so it leads us to write some sort of constructors for each variant. But tuples can solve this problem, and it even looks more similar to haskell's data and rust's enum.

Examples

// discriminated union as tuples
type A = ["a", { a: number }] | ["b": { b: number }];
const a: A = ["a", { /* both a and b are suggested when you fill in here */ }];
const b: A = ["b", { a: 1 }]; // type check works correctly! typescript tell us it's invalid.

// discriminated union as objects
type C = {
    tag: "a",
    a: number
} | {
    tag: "b",
    b: number
};
const c: C = { tag: "b", /* only b is suggested! */ };

Checklist

My suggestion meets these guidelines:

  • This wouldn't be a breaking change in existing TypeScript/JavaScript code
  • This wouldn't change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
  • This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
  • This isn't a runtime feature (e.g. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, etc.)
  • This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.

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 with the discriminated-unions section of the TypeScript handbook linked in the issue and compare the tuple and object examples. The work is done when tuple discriminated unions provide variant-specific autocomplete like the object form while preserving the existing type-checking behavior.

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
35/100

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