Incompatible BigNumber types across versions

hi @ricmoo! first off, thank you for all of your work on the ethers project. I really appreciate how you’ve laid the project out, seems like you’ve thought of everything. it has made it a lot more of a pleasure working with ethereum over the past 1.5 years i’ve been using ethers.

encountered some compile issues when loading up a React project on a new computer. it looks like there is a discrepancy with the BigNumber type between two different versions of ethers. a dependency is on a slightly older version of ethers.

I’m wondering if this has anything to do with my version of node, since I didn’t have a problem on my other computer (node 10.16 I think). I quickly looked into the issue the error describes, but I couldn’t find any difference in the Hexable interface or _hex properties - looked exactly the same. I didn’t have time to continue digging but I’m happy to contribute a solution if you might be able to point me in the right direction.

For now, downgrading my project to 4.0.28 works.

• node 12.14.1
• ethers 4.0.42 (my project)
• ethers 4.0.28 (dependency)

Failed to compile.

Type 'import("/<repo>/node_modules/<dependency>/node_modules/ethers/utils/bignumber").BigNumber' is not assignable to type 'import("/<repo>/node_modules/ethers/utils/bignumber").BigNumber'.
  Types have separate declarations of a private property '_hex'.  TS2322

    104 | 
    105 |     const params = await this.contract.functions.params()
  > 106 |     this.config.paramA = params.A
        |     ^

[ricmoo]

@julientregoat Oh… That looks wonderful. I will investigate it further and may go through and update lots of the library to use that.

Edit: Ah zut… They require ES6. I was planning to move to WeakMap anyways in the next (v6) of the library; this just means the syntax will be nicer. But for v5, looks like we are stuck with underscore named variables…

[ricmoo]

I’m going to close this now, as there isn’t really much I can do about it. Please feel free to re-open though, or continue comments (I monitor closed issues), since it may be useful to someone in the future that comes across this issue with the same problem.

Thanks! 😃