Design Meeting Notes, 10/16/2015

[RyanCavanaugh]

N.B. these notes use the word "module" extensively, which we now use to only mean "external module" in the old parlance. I will use "namespace" to refer to "internal modules" if needed.

Augmenting Types from External Modules (#5269, #4166)

• Bind operator is like extension methods for JS
  • But people do love .
  • And if you love .., prototype mutation is the only way to accomplish it
• Two problems facing Rx
  • How do I make a class appear to have methods that I don't want to implement
    • Remove the check for ambientness of classes merged with interfaces (:+1:)
  • How do I make the type of a global (or module-scoped) type depend on the set of modules that are imported?
    • This is an anti-pattern, but what can you do ¯_(ツ)_/¯
    • Some very terrible workarounds exist
    • Implementation approach
      • Binder has a concept of 'scripts' which contribute to the global, and 'modules' which contribute to their local scope, along with their separate exports
      • Only ambient modules have a symbol in the global scope, which is their quoted name
      • Module files never get a symbol and are not subject to merging; this is what we would need to change
        • Fix: add a canonical name to all module files so that they become mergable
      • This gets us augmentation of modules even from within other modules, which is currently disallowed
      • Q: How do you augment global types in this model?
        • A: We have a special string that means the global scope, use e.g. declare module '/' { or declare module '' {
      • Note that the types in a module would not directly visible in an interior ambient module declaration
        • Add an import declaration? It's weird. Maybe implicitly import them into scope... try it out and see what happens, should be OK
      • Q: How do we resolve these names?
        • A: Relative to the current file
      • Q: How do we produce these canonical names?
        • A: Need to figure that out. Doable.
      • Q: How do I refer to shadowed global types from within an ambient module inside a module?
        • A: Maybe you just don't... or refer to "./obs".Observable
        • A: Or `import { Observable } from './obs';
        • A: Or global.Array in the global case?
        • A: Or interface obs.Observable<T> { ... } <- nice
      • Theory that interface foo.bar { } always means extending bar from the foo namespace
        • With special LHS semantics for global
        • Can I declare things here, too?
          • Yes
      • Syntax/semantics: interface global::Foo, interface global.Foo, interface global Foo, ?
        • declare global var x;
        • declare in './obs' var x;
        • What happens if I try to declare in a non-existent module?
          • It's like an ambient external module?
      • Only ambient classes could use dotted declarations
        • Speculation that we could emit non-ambient classes this way
  • 👍 Conclusions
    • Allow merging of interfaces and non-ambient classes
    • declare module 'foo' { is allowed in modules
      • Are the containing module's symbols in scope? Yes, and the global symbols have priority
    • declare module '../relativePath' { is allowed in a module, but not in a script
      • Are the containing module's symbols in scope? Yes
    • declare global { augments the gloal scope, and is only allowed at top-level in a module (not a script)
      • Are module imports allowed in here? No.
      • Is export = allowed in here? No.
      • Are the containing module's symbols in scope? Yes
  • Rabble about declaration emitter
  • Vlad and Anders to tackle it