Wide change of uses of `any` to `unknown`

[ForwardFeed]

Beforehand

This is not that important and I will be volunteer to do it.
However not changing everything every 2 morning could be a quality of life so this definitively can be postponed.

Context

Uses of any in pure types have no side effect whatsoever, it is perfectly safe to use, and its impact on performance is not documented so it is likely that it doesn't have one

So why removing any in favor of unknown

In case someone ever use this repository to learn typescript, they could infer the wrong idea that any can be safely used.
unknown does the same job without making typescript seniors angry.

Other things to change in the same vein

replacing all generic type constraints akin to [ ] to readonly [ ] That's mostly me who caused some but I still put it here as a sticky note.

[komed3]

I completely agree with switching to the secure unknown type. Nevertheless, each type should be monitored for potential side effects after changing.

[ForwardFeed]

by monitored you mean we should introduce tests to all those 150 types?

[komed3]

No, not all, but changing any to unknown may result in side effects, as unknown is much stricter and could potentially cause other types to break. For these, we'd need to do minimal testing to make sure they still work.

[ForwardFeed]

Indeed, I went back to read the difference and I may have underestimated how much they differs.

Coming back to the testing, the general idea I get, would be

• to make another project.
• use this project in a git submodule to have the most direct link
• and do tests with a runtime?

Or should we test everything in this git project.

• make a test/ folder
• only do type only tests without running anything

[komed3]

As mentioned in #6 a second repo (and npm package) would tackle these testing concerns (and gives devs more tools). And I would prefer this solution rather than making devtypes larger and heavier as it is now.

If you want, I could take care of setting up the repo, and publishing it on npm later on.

---

any/unknown does indeed have some side effects that could matter when types are used in real projects.

A stupid but easy example is that the sum over test_any works, while it throws an error with test_unk:

const test_any: Record< string, any > = { a: 42, b: 99 };
const sum_any = Object.values( test_any ).reduce( ( c, a ) => c + a, 0 );

const test_unk: Record< string, unknown > = { a: 42, b: 99 };
const sum1_unk = Object.values( test_unk ).reduce( ( c, a ) => c + a, 0 );

I'm not sure how open types should be kept in devtypes, but we need to make sure they're open to every situation.

[ForwardFeed]

I'm making my own testing project for that one, I noticed that merge.ts wasn't merge.d.ts was it intentionnal?

[ForwardFeed]

By the way, here is the skelleton of my first prototype of testings: https://github.com/ForwardFeed/devtypes-tests
I made an automatic generator of file for tests so I should not be missing one

[komed3]

No, it just hadn't been renamed correctly yet - probably a leftover from implementation. It's been changed to .d.ts now ;)

Nice way to have tests per type in distinct files. But beware of internal types, like Path and Join from object.d.ts.

[ForwardFeed]

Thanks for the heads up, I made sure to only keep exported types