Can references path support package name?

Suggestion

🔍 Search Terms

projectReference, reference path, package name

✅ Viability Checklist

My suggestion meets these guidelines:

• This wouldn’t be a breaking change in existing TypeScript/JavaScript code
• This wouldn’t change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
• This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
• This isn’t a runtime feature (e.g. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, new syntax sugar for JS, etc.)
• This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript’s Design Goals.

⭐ Suggestion

add package name path support in tsconfig references path

📃 Motivating Example

originally, when we use project in a complex repo, path config can be nasty that only relative path is supported. so we have config like blow in our tsconfig.json.

{
"references": [
    { "path": "../libs/pkg-a" },
    { "path": "../../../libraries/pkg-b" },
    { "path": "../../../libraries/pkg-c/tsconfig.es.json" }
  ]
}

This is hard to trace the referenced config path, and also leads extra job when moving this package around in the repo. After implementation of package name support, above config can be simplified to

{
"references": [
    { "path": "@some/pkg-a" },
    { "path": "@some-other/pkg-b" },
    { "path": "@some-other/pkg-c/tsconfig.es.json" }
  ]
}

💻 Use Cases

[m1heng]

I think maybe adding a module path resolving logic in https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/1694c77060bc734cf2ce4feafe583a7bfb62fe76/src/compiler/tsbuild.ts#L145 would solve my problem.

[swandir]

Filenames are already assumed to be relative to the directory containing the tsconfig, so we’d need to have some different syntax, but it’s conceivable.

Perhaps a new key?

{
  "references": [
    { "module": "@scope/name/subpath" }
  ]
}