I just did some refactoring on a medium size code base and here are a few things to watch out for when adopting optional chaining and the new null coalescing operator:

  foo && await foo();

is not the same as

  await foo?.();

this will work in most cases but subtly, the await wraps the undefined case into a Promise, while the original code would skip the await altogether.

String regular expression matching returns null, not undefined, so rewriting code such as:

  const match = str.match(/reg(ex)/);
  return match && match[1];

is not the same thing as:

  return match?.[1];

because the latter returns undefined, not null, in case of match failure. This can cause problems if subsequent code expects null for match failure. An equivalent rewrite would be:

  return match?.[1] ?? null;

which is longer than the original and arguably less clear.

A common idiom to catch and ignore exceptions can interact poorly with optional chaining:

  const v = await foo().catch(_ => {});
  return v?.field; // property 'field' does not exist on type 'void'

This can be easily remedied by changing the first line to:

  const v = await foo().catch(_ => undefined);

Of course, these new operators are very welcome and will greatly simplify and help increase the safety of much existing code. But as in all things syntax, being judicious about usage of these operators is important to maximize clarity.

paulddraper

&& ?. || ??

It's a shame JS at the beginning doubled down on the "billon dollar mistake" [1] with two(!) kinds of NULL instead of just using Maybe/Option.

Ah well, if it were good it wouldn't be popular :/

[1] https://www.lucidchart.com/techblog/2015/08/31/the-worst-mis...

vikingcaffiene

Sorry, JS? While JS might get this stuff one day, these language features are for TypeScript which is its own language. It's strongly typed and just happens to interop with and in some scenarios transpile down to JavaScript. It's whole existence is to deal with that billion dollar mistake you mentioned.

Speaking of which, optional chaining and null coalescence are core language features of some very good languages. Kotlin and C# for instance. Kotlin, much like TypeScript, interops with a "broken" language (Java and the JVM in its case) and attempts to address some core deficiencies in that ecosystem. Let us have nice things!! :)

I am really excited about these new features and hope they do land in JS sooner rather than later. I hope they do the pipe operator next! `pipe |> operator|> plz`

svachalek

These features are copied from TC39 proposals for JavaScript. Presumably they were deemed safe to add to TS now that they have reached Stage 3 as JS proposals.

https://github.com/tc39/proposals