Generics in Typescript

A major part of software engineering is building components that not only have well-defined and consistent APIs, but are also reusable. Components that are capable of working on the data of today as well as the data of tomorrow will give you the most flexible capabilities for building up large software systems.

In languages like C# and Java, one of the main tools in the toolbox for creating reusable components is generics, that is, being able to create a component that can work over a variety of types rather than a single one. This allows users to consume these components and use their own types.

Hello World of Generics

To start off, let's do the “hello world” of generics: the identity function. The identity function is a function that will return back whatever is passed in. You can think of this in a similar way to the echo command.

Without generics, we would either have to give the identity function a specific type:

function identity(arg: number): number {
  return arg;
}

Or, we could describe the identity function using the any type:

function identity(arg: any): any {
  return arg;
}

While using any is certainly generic in that it will cause the function to accept any and all types for the type of arg, we actually are losing the information about what that type was when the function returns. If we passed in a number, the only information we have is that any type could be returned.

Instead, we need a way of capturing the type of the argument in such a way that we can also use it to denote what is being returned. Here, we will use a type variable, a special kind of variable that works on types rather than values.

function identity<Type>(arg: Type): Type {
  return arg;
}

We've now added a type variable Type to the identity function. This Type allows us to capture the type the user provides (e.g. number), so that we can use that information later. Here, we use Type again as the return type. On inspection, we can now see the same type is used for the argument and the return type. This allows us to traffic that type information in one side of the function and out the other.

We say that this version of the identity function is generic, as it works over a range of types. Unlike using any, it's also just as precise (ie, it doesn't lose any information) as the first identity function that used numbers for the argument and return type.

Once we've written the generic identity function, we can call it in one of two ways. The first way is to pass all of the arguments, including the type argument, to the function:

let output = identity<string>("myString");

let output: string

Here we explicitly set Type to be string as one of the arguments to the function call, denoted using the \<> around the arguments rather than ().

The second way is also perhaps the most common. Here we use type argument inference — that is, we want the compiler to set the value of Type for us automatically based on the type of the argument we pass in:

let output = identity("myString");
      
let output: string

Notice that we didn't have to explicitly pass the type in the angle brackets (\<>); the compiler just looked at the value "myString", and set Type to its type. While type argument inference can be a helpful tool to keep code shorter and more readable, you may need to explicitly pass in the type arguments as we did in the previous example when the compiler fails to infer the type, as may happen in more complex examples.