"Self" variable assumes window environment at the top level

[ChimeraCoder]

I'm using Typescript to write a content script for a Firefox extension. These run in a special environment in which a number of variables are pre-defined, self being one of them. I can use declare var content;, etc. to access them in TypeScript easily.

However, they do not run in the window environment (at least not directly), so window may not be defined, and self does not refer to window.self. Yet, when I do declare var self;, I get the following error:

error TS2403: Subsequent variable declarations must have the same type.  Variable 'self' must be of type 'Window', but here has type 'any'

So far, I haven't been able to find a way to convince tsc that self is actually a different type. This surprised me, because as far as I know, Typescript is not specific to the browser context. Should there be a flag to specify the runtime environment (or absence of one)?

[DanielRosenwasser]

You could in theory customize our lib.d.ts, remove the declaration, include the new file into your source, and compile with --noLib. Not sure if we really have a better solution at this point.

[saschanaz]

I wanted redeclare foo: Bar thing every time I encountered this kind of problem.

[mhegazy]

looks like what you want is to explicitly reference lib.code.d.ts, this does not have any DOM definitions, so no self, no window, this would be what you need for node development. the file is available in the same location as your tsc.ex/tsc.js, just add a reference to it on your commandline or in your project, and you should be good to go.

[mhegazy]

also to add more context, we did split the lib into multiple smaller files(e.g. core, dom, webworkers, wscript, ...etc.), but we are still looking into easier ways to surface this change. it is on the list of work items for 2.0 (see roadmap).

[ChimeraCoder]

Got it - thanks for clarifying. As per your comment in #2953, I think eventually a --lib flag would indeed solve this problem in the long run.

[mhegazy]

Looks like there is no further information needed at this point. closing.