Today I’m sharing a little trick that I like to use to make switch statements cleaner and more type-safe. Happy to hear other ideas!
There is support for this in Effect as another implementation.
Just have default throw an error? Then, if you add a value to the string union (hopefully) your tests will highlight it isnt handled.
Equally, for such a simple switch, surely a map is better?
But i rarely find myself using switches.
I find ifs with early returns cleaner. Allows for variable creation during execution (which my tslint complains about)I really appreciate compile errors in this scenario. In Rust the compiler will freak out when there are missing enum variants in a match. Tests are great, but compiler errors don’t rely on exhaustive and properly written tests.
Generally, I would recommend against throwing in the
defaultcase, since it will actually reduce your type safety (exceptions bypass all your other types). But I learned that with another clever trick this can be avoided, giving both runtime and compile time safety: https://exploringjs.com/tackling-ts/ch_enums.html#exhaustiveness-checks