Ability to replace return type of function type

[justinfagnani]

Search Terms

• replace return type
• parameters generic

Suggestion

I would like to be able to replace just the return type of a function with a utility type, like WithReturn<F, R>.

I'm not 100% sure this is needed, but it seems like using (...args: Parameters<F>) => R is not sufficient because any generics in F are lost.

Use Cases

My use case is a utility function that captures the arguments to a function to allow it to be called later.

Examples

export const defer = <F extends (...args: any) => any>(f: F) => ((
  ...args: Parameters<F>
) => ({
  function: f,
  args,
})) /* as any as F */;

const map = <T, R>(array: Array<T>, f: (i: T) => R) => array.map(f);
const deferredMap = defer(map);

let r = deferredMap([1], (i: number) => 2); // error now: Type 'unknown' is not assignable to type 'number'.(2345)
r.args; // error if defer returns F

Right now there's an error because the generics to map() are lost when using Parameters.

Playground: https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/?ssl=13&ssc=1&pln=1&pc=1#code/KYDwDg9gTgLgBAYwgOwM7wCbAGbCnAXjgB4AxOUGYZDVOACgDpmBDKAc1QC44XkBPAJSEAfLwEj62HqWEEx9egCg4cZozaceABTYsAtsCpRUZEUrkKA3irjYArsgQwAlih7YANLc2pvAX0FhAHoAKl46Pn4IuHJQ4IBuJSUkNHh9FjBCEgAVTzgAJUk2KBZ+HgBBKFL+YhyRfOkGFx4cy0L2krLGDLApQSTU9DgsXGrgDABZTOzRvHpegeSAGyM4fCI58anM+gBtAEYAXXz6Frhke30AIzx2gCYlqA0OVCSgA

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.

[awerlogus]

Very useful feature. This is the only way to implement flow function with unlimited parameters count, for example. We just need to recursively compute return type of the functions chain passed (this can be done using #38182) and then replace return type of the first function with it. There're very much cases of functions wrapping other functions and changing its return types. @RyanCavanaugh, You really should pay attention to this proposal.

[TylorS]

This would indeed be a very useful feature! I think it might be incredibly useful to have a syntax for mapping over the entirety of a function type including type parameters and return type, similar to a mapping over object/tuple types. Does that sound useful to others in the thread?

[awerlogus]

@TylorS We need to look at the code examples