Use bigint literals instead of BigInt constructor.

[bhollis]

Apologies if this has already been discussed, but looking at the output of ts-proto with --ts_proto_opt=forceLong=bigint, it uses BigInt("0") instead of 0n, which would be smaller output.

e.g.

message.myId !== BigInt("0")

vs.

message.myId !== 0n

[jcready]

Just a guess: some older parsers cannot handle BigInt literals (e.g. Webpack 4's parser), but function calls work just fine :)

[bhollis]

That makes sense, though isn't that more the role of Babel to generate downlevel code for older runtimes?

[stephenh]

Hi @bhollis , @jcready , I did a quick test of using 0n and looks like tsc requires a minimum runtime target in tsconfig.json to support it:

integration/map-bigint-optional/test.ts(127,17): error TS2737: BigInt literals are not available when targeting lower than ES2020.

So we could add a flag of like bigIntLiterals=true/false, maybe default it to true with the 🤞 that most users are on post-ES2020 targets.

I had started a PR to just do the find/replace:

#932

But given it needs an option to avoid breaking pre-2020 runtimes, dunno, may not be worth it?

[bhollis]

Makes sense. I don't know how necessary it is, I'm just obsessed with bundle size. I can always write a Babel or Terser plugin to do the transformation.

[stephenh]

Cool; fwiw I'm going to close this out b/c I'm personally not going to work on it, but also if a PR showed up that built on #932 but moved the behavior behind a flag (or did 0n by default, and would let users get the old behavior via a flag), so that pre-2020 runtimes would not break, that'd be great, and I'd definitely accept the PR. Thanks!

[stephenh]

🎉 This issue has been resolved in version 1.179.0 🎉

The release is available on:

• npm package (@latest dist-tag)
• GitHub release
• v1.179.0

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