Elusive breakage of Add all missing imports source action. Needs further investigation.

[ericchase]

The JavaScript and TypeScript Nightly v5.7.20240911 update broke some part of the Add all missing imports source action. Ever since then, some imports would be incorrectly imported with the type only attribute; i.e.

import type {} from "";

instead of

import {} from "";

for situations where type only imports are not correct.

[ericchase]

JavaScript and TypeScript Nightly v5.7.20240904 works as expected, as far as I can tell.

[mjbvz]

What about the current release, v5.7.20241021?

[ericchase]

did someone literally just fix this the same day? that's insane unlikely

[ericchase]

hmm, i made the mistake of not cloning the current state of my project in which this issue occurred, and now i can't reproduce it. well, next time i run into the problem again (this is NOT a single instance. it has happened to me in other projects), i will try to remember to freeze it

[ericchase]

looking back, i didn't perform as thorough an investigation as i should have. if i run into the same behavior again, i'll try to remember to push a repro and test it on a clean os installation.

i'll close this for now as not reproducible

[ericchase]

yay, the problem is happening again, i'll freeze this project and try to create a minimal reproduction. stay tuned

[ericchase]

A demonstration of how the Add all missing imports source action is broken, but normal Add import from ... works as expected.

2024-10-24_09.42.43.mp4

[ericchase]

here is the most minimal reproduction i could make with actual code that i use:

• https://github.com/ericchase/repro-vscode-typescript-nightly-extension-issue

for anyone who is familiar with Windows Sandbox, here is my fresh installation demonstrating the bug with completely fresh everything:

as promised, v5.7.20240904 works as expected:

any version after that does not work as expected:

[ericchase]

just in case:

it's hard to explain to non-windows users what Windows Sandbox is and how it's almost literally a "brand-new installation of Windows"[1], so there are no user settings or configurations whatsoever. this is a brand-new installation of vscode with no settings or configurations whatsoever.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-isolation/windows-sandbox/windows-sandbox-overview

[ericchase]

oh right, i almost forgot the most important part:

tsconfig.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "verbatimModuleSyntax": true
  }
}

this bug only happens when this property is enabled

[ericchase]

this problem is still occurring, and due to the change with typed arrays being generic over array buffer like, we can't really use the older versions of this extension anymore.

if anyone who reads this might have an idea of why this problem now exists, i would appreciate the insight

[ericchase]

finding it really hard to believe that no one else has reported this bug yet over the three months that it has been live.

is there a way to simply disable typescript extension from ever writing "import type {}..." statements and only write "import {}..." instead?
it's rather annoying, and i'd rather deal with the unused imports than have to fix the extension's mistake every single time.

[ericchase]

microsoft/TypeScript#36038
Seems like a similar topic was being discussed here back in 2020.

microsoft/TypeScript#36412 (comment)

An auto import will only be written as a type-only import if not doing so would result in an error. For that to be true, your tsconfig must have importsNotUsedAsValues: "error", and the place where you’re performing the auto-import must be a type position.

https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig/#importsNotUsedAsValues

Deprecated in favor of verbatimModuleSyntax.

https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig/#verbatimModuleSyntax
I'm honestly not sure what this option is supposed to be doing, and I personally feel like the docs suck at explaining it. I'm not sure if I should have it enabled or disabled, but since the problem occurs while it is enabled, I'll disable it and see how things go for a while.

Do note that this problem did not occur with earlier versions of this extension, so there's definitely some iffy stuff going on behind the scenes, but maybe that's exactly how the authors want it to work. Since no one else is talking about this, maybe no one is actually using verbatimModuleSyntax? (There's 4,686,749 downloads of this extension, so it's hard to imagine that being the case.)

Would still love more information about this topic if anyone who comes across this issue has any!