TypeScript

[tgriesser]

I think I mentioned this before, but this is the beginning of an experimental migration toward TypeScript. This may not get merged, so just consider this an experiment/WIP for now.

For starters, we'll have the TypeScript compiler building instead of Babel and just compile the js files, so we can migrate files one-at-a-time, but eventually some of the goals for this is:

• Full (strict) type coverage for all files, converted from js -> ts
• No export default anywhere, making it simpler to use an editor to do full project refactors based on the symbol
• Strong typings for splitting dialects out from the core
• Good use of generics to be able to return types (and possibly column names) in the builder
• Jest instead of mocha/tape - leveraging jest features like snapshot tests
• Simplified tests, a lot of things feel like a hack right now
• Less integration tests - shouldn't need to re-test things that are tested in the various dialect modules, we should assume that if the types check it's good, and we run a few simple queries just to be sure
• Stronger guarantees when doing more ambitious things like moving to async/await
• An overall better foundation for adding more ambitious features to the core

Probably will be broken for a bit, will be welcoming contributions once some of the core config for this is ironed out and we have some examples of the conventions to follow.

[tgriesser]

Just incase anyone is wondering, I'm going to be offline for the next 2-3 weeks but will pick this up when I get back.

[JakeGinnivan]

@tgriesser if you need a hand with this let me know :)

[tgriesser]

@JakeGinnivan thanks! Kind of gave up on this approach, going with more of a full scale internal rewrite so we can actually properly type all the internals from the start, and at the same time simplify/strip out a lot of unneeded layers (formatter, compiler, etc.).

It's coming along, I'm going to work to get it working in one of the dialects (probably mysql) and then I'll open a PR... at which point I'll definitely be reaching out for feedback/help migrating the other dialects.

[JakeGinnivan]

@tgriesser another option is to upgrade to babel 7 (which can parse the TypeScript types and ignore them), then setup tsc with --allow-js. Then you can start incrementally adding types and getting the benefit now.

[elhigu]

@JakeGinnivan we just updated to babel 7 two days ago :)

[tgriesser]

Closing in favor of https://github.com/tgriesser/knex-next (still super early on, nothing is actually setup from a connection standpoint, so don't look too much into it or expect it to work)

[tgriesser]

@JakeGinnivan I'd personally rather have no types internally than partial/loose types. Without --strict and usage across the whole codebase I fail to see any benefit over using the definitions from Definitely Typed from an end user perspective.

Also there's a ton of how the library is structured more generally I'd like to address with this effort and I believe TypeScript and some of the new ideas in the repo linked above will provide a path forward on that.

[wubzz]

@tgriesser knex-next looks interesting, big step up. Would like to help when possible. I guess this early on would just be getting in the way, but just FYI.