Bloomberg TS5.5-beta feedback [part two]

Acknowledgement

• I acknowledge that issues using this template may be closed without further explanation at the maintainer's discretion.

Comment

I was delayed starting my half of Bloomberg's TypeScript beta analysis. Part one here: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/58523

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We are in the process of evaluating the impact of TS 5.5 beta on Bloomberg code. Below are preliminary findings.

Overall this looks to be a very positive release.

Change	Affects	Release notes	Packages affected
Cleaner .d.ts emit	Declaration	Yes	Over 20%
Inferred type predicates	Type Checking	Yes	4
Control flow narrowing for constant indexed access	Type Checking	Yes	1
Stricter module interpretation	Type Checking & Emit	Yes	8
noCheck builds

Cleaner `.d.ts` emit

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-5-5-beta/#isolated-declarations

Over 10% of our packages stopped erroring compared to using TypeScript 5.4 due to now emitting .d.ts that pass our post-build declaration validation steps; a primary check is that the .d.ts are only using valid imports. This is most likely due to the reduction of inferred dynamic type imports and instead using imports from the original source:

+ import type { Foo } from "./local-file";
- export declare const thing: (arg: Utility<import("../path/to/something").Value>) => void;
+ export declare const thing: (arg: Foo) => void;

We also noticed cases where jsdoc started to be preserved in the .d.ts emit, which was great.

 declare const Vec3d: {
     create: {
+        /**
+         * Useful documentation here
+         */
         (): Vec3d;
     }

Inferred type predicates

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-5-5-beta/#inferred-type-predicates

Four packages started to error due to inferred type predicates. The code changes required to fix these errors were straight forward.

Control flow narrowing for constant indexed access

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-5-5-beta/#control-flow-narrowing-for-constant-indexed-accesses

Only one package started to error due to this change. The code changes required to fix the error was straight forward.

Stricter module interpretation

• https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-5-5-beta/#respecting-file-extensions-and-packagejson-in-other-module-modes

We've had a mixture of issues here. For context on the projects we saw errors: while there is a package.json in a parent directory, usually above the tsconfig.json directory, this is not for the TypeScript project. The package.json is there for the repo-wide tooling (e.g. eslint). The TypeScript project within the repo is not a Node package.

For the teams that have specified "type": "module" in this package.json we started to get build errors for projects that were relying on some of the previously allowed CJS compatibility.

Two projects were using export = in a .d.ts file and started to get:

error TS1203: Export assignment cannot be used when targeting ECMAScript modules

Four projects were incorrectly using the synthetic default export:

error TS1192: Module has no default export.

One project had "type": "commonjs" in their package.json which meant that it started to emit CJS, even though the tsconfig.json 'target' was set to esnext. To fix this we will likely need to update the repo to remove the "type": "commonjs".

`noCheck` builds

While not publicly exposed I used a locally patched version of typescript.js to analyze the potential impact of noCheck: false on ts.transpileModule and #50699.
The results were very promising, a 4 second build dropped down to 2.2 seconds.

Start by reading the findings in this issue, the linked TypeScript 5.5 beta release notes, and issue #50699. The only implementation entry point mentioned is ts.transpileModule, evaluated with a locally patched typescript.js. Done is not defined because the report requests no specific code change or acceptance test.