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Way to detect whether a callable has type parameters

Open mhofman opened this issue 9 months ago • 0 comments

🔍 Search Terms

conditional type detect callable type parameter

✅ Viability Checklist

  • [x] This wouldn't be a breaking change in existing TypeScript/JavaScript code
  • [x] This wouldn't change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
  • [x] This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
  • [x] This isn't a runtime feature (e.g. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, new syntax sugar for JS, etc.)
  • [x] This isn't a request to add a new utility type: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/No-New-Utility-Types
  • [x] This feature would agree with the rest of our Design Goals: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/TypeScript-Design-Goals

⭐ Suggestion

I'm looking for some way to detect if a callable type is generic and has type parameters.

LLMs are hallucinating an answer that would be nice if it worked:

type HasTypeParameter<T extends (...args: any[]) => any> =
  T extends <G>(...args: any[]) => any ? true : false;

📃 Motivating Example

I have a utility type that wants to map the return value of a callable. However because as far as I know it's not possible to map a type-parametrized callable keeping its parametrization, we prefer to bail out in this case and maintain the original type.

Roughly it looks like

type MappedCallable<T extends Callable> = HasTypeParameter<T> extends true 
  ? T
  : (...args: Parameters<T>) => MappedResult<ReturnType<T>>;

💻 Use Cases

I can achieve this detection in some case where the type of the callable is incompatible with a mapped callable were its type parameters inferred as any.

type LimitedHasTypeArgument<T extends (...args: any[]) => any> =
  ((...args: Parameters<T>) => ReturnType<T>) extends T ? false : true

However this doesn't work in some more complex cases (still trying to get a minimal repro).

I cannot think of other workarounds, which is forcing us to forego the result type mapping completely.

Of course having a way to keep the callable type-parametrization in the result mapping would be even better.

The specific use case is to map all callable in the result, including object methods, to callables returning a promise, while maintaining other parts of their signature.

mhofman avatar Jun 10 '25 02:06 mhofman