[experiment] Improve Effects assignability after adding Symbol.iterator by replacing voids with unknown

[Andarist]

This is not for merging, I just put it together since I was curious if I could make it work this way. This work was started based on the initial commit from #2602

It doesn't (yet?) allow you to remove the adapter thing from this branch but perhaps this is just missing some minor thing. I'm not sure if there were any extra changes done by @tim-smart to allow that. This PR focuses solely on making this to typecheck with the added Symbol.iterator method.

There are a few minor TODO comments here but all of them (but one!) are really about the same thing - adding Symbol.iterator properly to your error classes.

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[mikearnaldi]

Nice!

[mikearnaldi]

This is part of a larger discussion about using "void" instead of "unknown" when we don't care about the value of an effect, in theory it would make sense

[tim-smart]

Thanks for taking the time to look at this :)

Replacing void with unknown does feel weird, feels like we are losing some semantics by making the return types too generic.

[Andarist]

What kind of semantics you'd lose? I find void to be quite weird and problematic at times. Take a look at this:

declare const test: string | void | undefined;

if (test === undefined) {
  test; // void | undefined
} else {
  test; // string
}

[tim-smart]

Mainly you lose some meaning / intent. This function returns nothing (void) vs this function could return anything but we don't care what (unknown).

[mikearnaldi]

Mainly you lose some meaning / intent. This function returns nothing (void) vs this function could return anything but we don't care what (unknown).

Void doesn't mean that this function returns nothing, it means that we don't care about the return

[Andarist]

Yeah, so in that sense usually either unknown or undefined is (IMHO) a better more-predictable choice (depending on your needs).

This is perfectly valid:

const test: () => void = () => 42;

[tim-smart]

But in terms of familiarity for the majority of developers, most of them know that

const myFn = () => {
  // No explicit return
}

Will infer a return type of void. I just think that familiarity is worth something.

[mikearnaldi]

But in terms of familiarity for the majority of developers, most of them know that

const myFn = () => {
  // No explicit return
}

Will infer a return type of void. I just think that familiarity is worth something.

yes it will infer void, but you can also type void and return, the meaning really is "whatever" and given it is sometimes treated as undefined it creates potential issues