Recursive Interfaces Cause Infinite Paths

[anthonyjoeseph]

🐛 Bug report

Recursive Interfaces Cause Infinite Paths

Current Behavior

import { pipe } from 'fp-ts'
import { get } from 'spectacles-ts'
interface Recursive {
   key: Recursive;
}
declare const r: Recursive
const key = pipe(r, get("key"))
// type instantiation is excessively deep and possibly infinite
// (it is infinite!)

Expected behavior

const key = pipe(r, get("key"))
// key: Recursive

Reproducible example

Types from the DOM are great test cases here

Element, Document etc.

Suggested solution(s)

Check at each Path that it does not extend one of its parent interfaces

Would allow exactly one traversal of a recursive interface

Should be simple, relatively lightweight (in that it wouldn't involve a distributive conditional) and (I don't think) would trigger false positives

Additional context

This shouldn't affect too too many use cases - 'get' on a DOM node, 'set' for a 'tree' value - anything else?

I don't think many people are using immutability helper or immer.js for this kind of thing

Your environment

Software	Version(s)
spectacles-ts	1.0.7
fp-ts	2.11
TypeScript	4.6

[chrisfernandes102]

Left a comment here: https://github.com/anthonyjoeseph/spectacles-ts/issues/19#issuecomment-1164811271

Running into the same problem :)