ACacemarke·Aug 23, 2022
Heh, it's amusing to see Redux Toolkit referenced here. I'm one of the two main RTK maintainers. My co-maintainer Lenz Weber is responsible for most of our TS type wizardry.
Agreed that writing TS types for libs can be a pain. I actually did a talk recently on "Lessons Learned Maintaining TS Libraries" [0], where I talked about some of the techniques we used, and some possible TS changes that would be helpful for us as maintainers.
As one recent example, TS made a change in a 4.8 pre-alpha that broke RTK's `createSlice` types. Lenz tried to come up with a fix, couldn't, and had to add a workaround to check what TS version is being used and specifically use an altered type. Since there _isn't_ a good way to know what TS version is being used, Lenz resorted to hacking together a new package that abuses the `typesVersions` property to defi
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ne a different TS type for _every_ TS major+minor version combo, and then used that to decide what the RTK type should look like conditionally [1].
Another pain point is debugging type transformations. I reworked the Reselect types in 4.1.x to do a much better job of inferring the argument types for the final selector, based on the intersection of all the input selector arguments. This ended up as a monstrous type that does a types-level map + transpose + intersection [2]. It took me weeks to get this working right, and I frequently had to break it down into multiple small intermediate types to see how TS was processing each step.
I know that someone on Twitter was recently working on an alternate TS type-checker based on bytecode, and they said they had some kind of a working types-level debugger [3]. Having something like that officially, where I could see each step of how TS was transforming the types, would be _hugely_ valuable.
There's a couple folks like AndaristRake who are able to dig into the internals of the TS compiler itself to trace how it's interpreting the types. I definitely don't have that ability :)
[0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2022/05/presentations-ts-l...
[1] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/pull/2547
[2] https://github.com/reduxjs/reselect/blob/v4.1.5/src/types.ts...
[3] https://twitter.com/MarcJSchmidt/status/1539787500788613120