Consider having "go-to-definition" on Records redirect to the associated typedef

[rrousselGit]

Consider:

typedef Example = ({int a});

Then used as:

Example record;

record.a;

Currently, "go-to-definition" when applied on .a does nothing.

Since a typedef is associated, could we redirect to said typedef?

[bwilkerson]

I don't believe that the analyzer's semantic model has the information we need in order for this to work in general. (We could special case it in situations where the typedef is defined in the same part in which it's being used, but that's probably too limited to be valuable.) It tends to discard information about where types come from. This is especially true for structural types.

@johnniwinther @stereotype441 @scheglov What are your thoughts around keeping more information about where structural types came from? Having this extra information would allow us to improve our support for structural types, but might impact the performance of the analyzer.

[stereotype441]

@johnniwinther @stereotype441 @scheglov What are your thoughts around keeping more information about where structural types came from? Having this extra information would allow us to improve our support for structural types, but might impact the performance of the analyzer.

I definitely think it's worth considering, and my guess is that both the implementation effort and the performance impact would be fairly low: we could probably do it by adding a single nullable field to RecordTypeImpl that points to a TypeAliasElement. To handle typedefs with type parameters (e.g. typedef F<T> = (T, int);) we might additionally need to add a TypeAliasMember class that implements TypeAliasElement.

[FMorschel]

The other part of this request (Go to Definition moving to typedef) is actually:

• Go to type definition should go to typedef #57013