microsoft / microsoft/TypeScript

Preserve ordered yield types when no logic is involved

Open
#43,150 8 comments 8 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Awaiting More Feedback Suggestion
Dominant language
Go
Stars
111k
Forks
14.3k
Avg merge
2d 4h
Merged PRs (30d)
132

Description

Suggestion

🔍 Search Terms

yield ordered return types

✅ Viability 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, new syntax sugar for JS, etc.)
  • This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.

⭐ Suggestion

Make types more definite for each yielded return value in a generator function

See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66538431/function-chain-factory-in-typescript-preserving-input-output-types

📃 Motivating Example

Right now, if I do this:

function* work() {
  yield 1;
  yield 'test';
  return [123];
}

Right now this gives:

const g = work();
g.next().value  // string | number | number[]
g.next().value  // string | number | number[]
g.next().value  // string | number | number[]

But since there's no logic/branching/etc, it would be more helpful to me to have:

const g = work();
g.next().value  // number
g.next().value  // string
g.next().value  // number[]

💻 Use Cases

Sometimes I want to use a function generator to represent a series of steps that I want to examine (whether at runtime or during testing, etc) before deciding whether to continue. In other words, I want to break up a function into a series of "pauseable" steps.

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

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points. Start by validating the generator examples and reviewing the linked Stack Overflow use case. Done means successive generator results expose the ordered yield and return types without changing JavaScript runtime behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

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

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.