Generation of TypeScript Declaration Files from JavaScript Code

TL;DR

This paper introduces dts-generate, a tool that automatically creates TypeScript declaration files from JavaScript libraries by executing code examples and extracting runtime information, reducing manual effort and errors.

Contribution

The work presents a novel automated approach to generate accurate TypeScript declaration files from JavaScript code using runtime analysis of documentation examples.

Findings

Generated declaration files matched or could be improved by existing ones

The tool successfully automates declaration file creation for NPM packages

Most discrepancies are resolvable by extending code examples

Abstract

Developers are starting to write large and complex applications in TypeScript, a typed dialect of JavaScript. TypeScript applications integrate JavaScript libraries via typed descriptions of their APIs called declaration files. DefinitelyTyped is the standard public repository for these files. The repository is populated and maintained manually by volunteers, which is error-prone and time consuming. Discrepancies between a declaration file and the JavaScript implementation lead to incorrect feedback from the TypeScript IDE and, thus, to incorrect uses of the underlying JavaScript library. This work presents dts-generate, a tool that generates TypeScript declaration files for JavaScript libraries uploaded to the NPM registry. It extracts code examples from the documentation written by the developer, executes the library driven by the examples, gathers run-time information, and generates a declaration file based on this information. To evaluate the tool, 249 declaration files were generated directly from an NPM module and 111 of these were compared with the corresponding declaration file provided on DefinitelyTyped. All these files either exhibited no differences at all or differences that can be resolved by extending the developer-provided examples.