Missing type narrowing based on control flow analysis of logical expressions

[mhofman]

Bug Report

🔎 Search Terms

Control-flow analysis logical

🕗 Version & Regression Information

• This is the behavior in every version I tried, and I reviewed the FAQ

⏯ Playground Link

Playground link with relevant code

💻 Code

declare function fail(): never;

declare const a: string | null;
declare const b: string | null;

if (!a) fail();
a.charAt(0); // a is correctly narrowed to `string`

b || fail();
b.charAt(0); // Object is possibly 'null'. ts(2531)

🙁 Actual behavior

It seems that the branches of logical expressions do not impact control flow analysis, and thus the logical expression form is not equivalent to the conditional form, resulting in the type of b not being narrowed.

🙂 Expected behavior

b narrowed to the string type.

[jakebailey]

Based on #32695 I'm pretty sure that this is a design limitation and is working as expected, specifically, this rule:

the call occurs as a top-level expression statement

The fail() expression is not a top-level expression statement, so is not included in CFA.

See also issues like #47634 (or other issues that link back to #32695).

[mhofman]

This is unfortunate. In our case we have tons of checks of the form assert(condition, errorMessageExpression) that we realized have a significant performance cost because more often than not, errorMessageExpression is complex. We're looking at alternative styles and would really prefer using logical operators for their terseness, but would lose type narrowing.

[JoostK]

You could consider an approach using optional chaining syntax, where the receiver object is nullified in production contexts:

debug?.assert(...);

TypeScript is doing something similar for trace logging.

Edit: although thinking about it some more, that might still not allow CFA narrowing as the guard is then only conditionally applied.

[mhofman]

You could consider an approach using optional chaining syntax, where the receiver object is nullified in production contexts

I fail to see how this is relevant. Our checks are meant to be for production, not for local debugging. The part of the check on the left-hand side of the || operator is the condition being checked/asserted, which can be arbitrary. The fail call needs to be performed conditionally solely based on the result of the check, not some environment configuration.

[mhofman]

To clarify this was closed as "completed" but the limitation has not changed in newer versions.

It would be great to reevaluate the possibility to do this given the recent improvements in type narrowing.