String Enum Initializer

String Enum Initializer

A more typesafe and succinct way of defining enum types that compile to strings

Search Terms

enum, string, string enum default value initializer infer

Proposal

It seems like you should be able to specify that you are using a string enum, and then you’d only have to write out the ‘value’ once, and it would be automatically made into a string matching the enum code.

enum<string> Action {
   LOAD_PROFILE,
   ADD_TASK,
   REMOVE_TASK
}

or

enum Action: string {
   LOAD_PROFILE,
   ADD_TASK,
   REMOVE_TASK
}

instead of

enum Action {
   LOAD_PROFILE = "LOAD_PROFILE",
   ADD_TASK = "ADD_TASK",
   REMOVE_TASK = "REMOVE_TASK"
}

Thanks for all the great work!

EDIT Recently updated to reflect variations proposed by @imcotton here and @lostpebble here; as well as search terms proposed by @KennethKo (#36319) and @garrettmaring (#33015)

[RyanCavanaugh]

We’re always looking at things holistically. There are over 1,000 open suggestions and it would be a complete disaster to just do all of them; features need to more than pay for themselves in terms of new complexity vs value added.

We have to consider questions like:

• Does this enable you to do something you couldn’t do before?
  • No - it’s pure sugar
• If not, is the existing way of doing it truly burdensome, or just a bit annoying?
  • It’s just annoying
• How many people are affected by the feature not existing?
  • The answer appears to be 13ish?
• Could this be solved in some other way, such as tooling?
  • “Convert numeric enum to string enum” refactoring would be trivial to write; we should consider doing that instead
• Is there strong precedent from other languages implying a need here?
  • No
• Are there frameworks or libraries whose patterns are greatly simplified by it?
  • No (?)

The bar is much higher than you probably think it is - once something goes into the language, we can’t take it out, and everything that exists is something that future TS learners will need to understand. Features at the language level need to feel like “the thing we’ve been missing all along”, not “this would be nice”.

[imcotton]

like this?

enum Action: string {
    LOAD_PROFILE,
    ADD_TASK,
    REMOVE_TASK,
}