What’s new with TypeScript 4.0 rc

TypeScript 4.0 is almost there. The release candidate is here!

In this article, I’ll go over everything that’s been announced so far.

I’ll only cover the language features. I might write additional posts to cover what’s also coming regarding editor productivity, performance, and bug fixes.

Please keep in mind that this is article is based on release candidate release notes and a roadmap, it doesn’t mean that everything will actually be part of the final release as is.

Class property inference from constructors

Currently, when tsc is configured innoImplicitAny mode, the following TS code doesn’t compile:

Now that this PR has been merged and thus, as of TS 4.0, the code above will compile and TypeScript will infer the type of x to be string | boolean.

This is one more case where TypeScript’s type inference will help us out!

Short-circuiting assignment operators

This proposal, introduced by Daniel Rentz, corresponds to a TC39 proposal called “proposal-logic-assignment”, which is now in Stage 3 (i.e., almost good to go!).

It aims to combine logical operators and assignment expressions. Combined with nullish coalescing, which we’ve got since TS 3.7, we will be able to write more condensed code.

Here’s an example given in the proposal:

obj1.obj2.obj3.x ??= 42;

And the same code without those new short-circuiting operators:

obj1.obj2.obj3.x = obj1.obj2.obj3.x ?? 42;

As you can see, with support for this, we would have an even more expressive language, and we’d be able to combine checks and assignments, which would be great.

As mentioned by Daniel Rosenwasser, we’d get one such operator for each of the logical operators, thus:

LeftHandSideExpression &&=…