Future: Possibly more automated type compilation

[joshgoebel]

Getting access to the types in my main source. My source is all JS, it exports no types... all the type exports are ambient modules.

I’m proposing the inverse: define your types in your code.

I dunno what that means? You mean declare them in highlight.js itself and then export them, import them into index.d.ts and then reexport them? I'm not sure I know how to do that if that's possible - or advisable?

Indeed: write them in JavaScript. No need to add a manual index.d.ts: typescript can compile javascript and generate that index.d.ts.

Here’s a smaller example: words/levenshtein-edit-distance@2c3d890.
Lowlight is a bit more involved.
A bit more complex is unist-util-select: syntax-tree/unist-util-select@4c1b02e.
And quite complex is xdm: https://github.com/wooorm/xdm.

I am not a fan of typescript. I personally don’t really love types either. But they are somewhat useful — especially for newcomers to a giant ecosystem (unified).
I think types through jsdoc in javascript is rather nice: code is directly runnable, no building needed. But everything is still type checked by typescript (and I like type-coverage to ensure everything is completely typed).
It ensures .d.ts are kept up to date and work

Some more info here: https://github.com/voxpelli/types-in-js

Originally posted by @wooorm in #3131 (comment)

[joshgoebel]

If someone knows how this is done and would like to whip up a tiny PR, I'd love to see it. I think what would be since is a tiny utility script that we could run periodically that would compile the types. I also wonder if this magically will create ambient modules as we do now.

[stevenks17]

I think I can do this via adding a script command to generate types by using the typescript cli to generate the .d.ts files with some config options in the tsconfig.json. Can I be assigned this?

[joshgoebel]

Just don't get your hopes up. This isn't a guaranteed merge. I want to see how exactly this would work and have a chance to play with it to see if it feels right.

[wooorm]

JSDoc in TS got a lot better the last 3 years btw. The’ve added more useful features.