Prevent opaque types leaking from transparent inline methods #23792
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Fixes #13461
Before this PR, every transparent inline call returning an opaque type would actually be typed with an intersection type DECLARED & ACTUAL, where DECLARED was the declared return type of the transparent method, and ACTUAL was the type actually returned in the expansion, with every opaque type alias then dealiased. There was no way to guard against this dealiasing. With the changes in this PR, users are now able to manually ensure that they receive the types they want, although they might have to manually annotate the returned type inside of the transparent inline method body (as described in the added documentation section).
The previous dealiasing was caused by the proxy mechanism in inlining, which would effectively deals every opaque type, that is transparent from the perspective of the original method declaration. Now, we try to map the results of the transparent inline back to the original (opaque) types.
However all of this is only true for the outermost transparent inline method calls. Nested calls will not be affected by this change. This is because the type checker in the original context of the method will see the opaque type as transparent (so it will type the rest of the method according to that), and that typing must still hold after inlining the method e.g.:
This might cause the aliased type to still leak in a manner that may feel unexpected. In the above example, even if the List does not have an explicit type parameter, the type inference will still decide on
String
, causing any call to listTime to leak that type. This is also touched upon in the added docs.This PR might cause some source/library incompatibilities connected to the changed returned types (but I doubt it’s many, considering the additional required effort of ignoring type inference if we want the outputted type to be different).