Design Meeting Notes, 2026-06-23

[DanielRosenwasser]

isolatedDeclarations and Control Flow Analysis

microsoft/typescript-go#4367

• Want to be able to infer types for trivial expressions in isolatedDeclarations in a function block.
  • Specifically in discussion is if there are no return statements.
• But what happpens when you have a never-returning call? That can cause a never.
• Feels like anything with multiple statements in the body is questionable.
• We could make a special-case for () => {}.
  • Probably enough to just say "just write void".
• Feels bad to say we can't come up with a type for () => {}
  • Why? Feels like it's not a big deal?
  • Well it's even more trivial than a single expression being returned.
  • Sure, but the reason we added trivial expression inference was because people often have bigger structures of objects that are nested. So the triviality was not really about writing small expressions.
• One reason why we didn't do it (we think) is that we don't want to close the door to ourselves on how void vs. undefined is inferred for no-return-expression functions.