microsoft / microsoft/TypeScript

Infer typeof self if unspecified on cast

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#45,618 11 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Description

Suggestion

🔍 Search Terms

  • type casting
  • implicit typing
  • syntactic sugar

✅ 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

It would be a lot cleaner if when you cast a type to some other type (for example NonNullable) you don't have to specify typeof self.

📃 Motivating Example

if you have an Array that could be undefined you can filter out undefined like so

const array = ["one", undefined, "two"].filter(Boolean);
console.log(array) // ["one", "two"]

but in this case the type would still be (string | undefined)[] so it would cause linting errors later in the code. While this may be specific to the .filter method, it may be unreasonable to expect all methods accurately account for type checks like this. So one easy way to fix this would just be to do

const arrayUndefined = ["one", undefined, "two"]

const array = arrayUndefined.filter(Boolean) as NonNullable<UnArrayify<typeof arrayUndefined>>

what I'm suggesting is that instead of requiring you do typeof arrayUndefined you can instead do an implicit cast to make the code cleaner

const arrayUndefined = ["one", undefined, "two"]

// it's implied that UnArrayify would be called with <typeof array.filter(Boolean)>
const array = arrayUndefined.filter(Boolean) as NonNullable<UnArrayify>

💻 Use Cases

I would like this because it would result in cleaner typing for unhandled edgecases in the typescript linter

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

No file or test is named. Start by reproducing the two cast examples and examining how TypeScript handles type assertions and inferred expression types; compare the proposed implicit generic argument with the existing typeof form. Done would require agreed semantics, implementation coverage, and tests for the filter and NonNullable cases.

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
30/100

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