Inline tsdoc comment support

[quantizor]

Search Terms

tsdoc, comments, IDE, line sorting

Suggestion

When writing a type, sometimes you want to add more information to a field that will be surfaced in IDE autocomplete. Currently you must define them like this:

export type BoxSizeDefinition = {
  /** this is null for non-custom box sizes */
  itemCount: number | null
  size: BoxSize
  /** A description for the range of pounds included in box. */
  poundage: string
  /** price in cents of the box size */
  price: number
}

Note that the comment is above the field. This is problematic because auto-sorting linters and such will mangle the comments.

I propose also supporting inline tsdoc comments:

export type BoxSizeDefinition = {
  itemCount: number | null /** this is null for non-custom box sizes */
  size: BoxSize
  poundage: string /** A description for the range of pounds included in box. */
  price: number /** price in cents of the box size */
}

This effectively fixes the sorting problem.

Use Cases

Adding descriptive text to be shown via IDE autocomplete for fields (currently supported, but not in a sorting & codeaction-friendly way.)

Examples

See above

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, etc.)
• This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.

[trusktr]

This wouldn't work well, other tools don't expect this sort of meaning of whitespace. It would break Prettier expectations, for example. Not saying it isn't possible, but it would need consensus across multiple projects to make it work well.