Design Meeting Notes, 8/3/2018

[DanielRosenwasser]

Thoughts about unification

declare function compose<T, U, V>(a: (x: T) => U, b: (y: U) => V): (x: )

• Works fine today if you pass it in non-generic functions, but not for if you pass in generic functions.

• However, gives bad results today for a generic function.

• Ideally, you'd like to be able to use compose on higher-order functions like the following:

  declare function compose<T, U, V>(a: (x: T) => U, b: (y: U) => V): (x: T) => V;
  declare function arrayToList<T>(x: Array<T>): List<T>;
  declare function box<U>(x: U): { value: U };
  
  compose(arrayToList, box) // <T>(x: Array<T>) => { value: List<T> }

• Idea: you want to float out the free type variables into the result type for whatever doesn't get unified.

  • Marin Marinov (@gcnew) came the closest to getting something that would work appropriately for TypeScript

You want to build up the inferences:

declare function compose<A, B, C>(a: (x: A) => B, b: (y: B) => C): (x: A) => C;
declare function arrayToList<T>(x: Array<T>): List<T>;
declare function box<U>(x: U): { value: U };

compose(arrayToList, box);

// A = Array<T>
// B = List<T>
// B = U
// C = { value: U }

You iterate on A, B, and C, finding new "truths" about the relationships between these type variables. For example, you can see that:

U = List<T>

and then

C = { value: List<T> }

But there are questions: how do you

Parameters type aliases

#26042

• Problem: you want to constrain this type to some function type.
  • Otherwise you can get garbage.
• Thought: you kind of want something like

type Parameters<T extends (...args: (infer U)) => any> = U;

• Conclusion: we'll fix up the type an add it to the library.

Method parameter inference

#23911