xander76 OP t1_je81147 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 2:01 AM

Reply to comment by bluenigma in [P] Imaginary programming: implementation-free TypeScript functions for GPT-powered web development by xander76

So usually, yes, that’s true about TypeScript. Types are removed by the compiler.

But we wrote a typescript & Babel compiler plug-in, which allows us to replace the imaginary function with whatever code we want. So we replace the imaginary function with code that includes a run-time type check for the appropriate return type from the TypeScript definition. Does that make sense?

bluenigma t1_je84g9s wrote on March 30, 2023 at 2:27 AM

I guess I'm still wondering that if you can generate a runtime type check for an arbitrary Typescript type at compile time, why is this not a builtin Typescript language feature?

Edit: Took a quick look at the code and it it looks to me like there's definitely limitations on what return types are supported. Looks like it can handle basic aliases and record types, but throws on a lot of other stuff?

Should probably be documented somewhere.

xander76 OP t1_je8d46w wrote on March 30, 2023 at 3:41 AM

Yep, I should have been clearer that (at least for now) it only supports JSON-compatible types and doesn’t support type aliases or classes (although we have a prototype version that does). The limitations are documented at https://imaginary.dev/docs/writing-an-imaginary-function .