recursive return type for deterministic generators

[aleclarson]

Suggestion

If a generator neither yields inside a loop nor defers to another generator, it's considered deterministic. For any given number of next calls, the compiler could theoretically reduce the generator to the exact type of its next yield. Of course, because generators are mutable, this isn't true. But what if I'm using a library that allows for immutable generators? For every next call, a new generator is returned. Maybe it should be possible to introspect the order of yields in a deterministic generator, and use that to deduce a recursive type structure that represents an immutable generator.

import immutagen from 'immutagen'

const gen = immutagen(function* foo() {
  yield 0
  yield 1
})

const a = gen()
const b = a.next()
typeof a // => { value: 0, next: () => typeof b }
typeof b // => { value: 1, next: undefined }

Checklist

My suggestion meets these guidelines:

• This wouldn't be a breaking change in existing TypeScript / JavaScript code
• This wouldn't change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
• This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
• This isn't a runtime feature (e.g. new expression-level syntax)