Suggestion

🔍 Search Terms

getter, predicate, type guard

✅ Viability 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. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, new syntax sugar for JS, etc.)
• [✅] This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.

⭐ Suggestion

This has been requested before (e.g., #6994) but declined because at the time getters were merely an aspect of implementation. Since that is no longer the case, would there be any interest in revisiting the suggestion?

📃 Motivating Example

class Person {
    name?: string;
}

class Thing {
    constructor(public owner: Person | null = null) {}

    get isOwned(): this is Owned<this> {
      return !!this.owner;
    }
}

type Owned<T extends Thing> = T & { owner: NonNullable<T['owner']> };

💻 Use Cases

I have a use case much like the above. Currently type narrowing by checking thing.owner isn't honored when thing is used as a function argument:

function doSomethingWithOwnedThing(ownedThing: Owned<Thing>) {}

declare const thing: Thing;

if (thing.owner) {
    thing.owner.name; // ok
    doSomethingWithOwnedThing(thing); // not ok (thing.owner is possibly `null`)
}

With the above, I can create a normal function or method that returns a type predicate or otherwise simply assert that thing is an Owned<Thing>. Given that user-defined type guards are encapsulated type assertions, and getters are shiny and neat, a boolean getter that doubles as a type guard would be nicest.