Leveraging generics in typescript can lead to more verbose code, this can make your codebase more difficult to read and maintain. A quick optimization you can use to reduce the amount of syntactic noise is called type argument inference.
We’ll use the identity function to demonstrate this feature. In case you’re wondering, an identity function is a function that returns a given argument.
Let’s use this simple definition.
const identity = <T>(arg: T): T => arg
Here is how we would normally call this function.
identity<string>("hello world.")
// another example
identity<number>(123)
Using the type argument inference feature we can simplify this code by having typescript infer the generic based off the argument being passed in. So now both examples become:
identity("hello world.")
// and
identity(123)
Now we don’t have to specify the type and get to avoid typing and reading the arrow symbols.
Closing thoughts
This is a little optimization that improve the code clarity. While it’s not worth refactoring your whole codebase in one fell swoop, this is the perfect thing to automate with a linter or your code editor.