I’ve been familiar with the strictNullChecks flag in TypeScript for a long time. However, it wasn’t until recently that I had a chance to work with a huge codebase with strict mode enabled. Although I was aware of the benefits of this flag, I didn’t expect it to be as awesome as it turned out to be in reality.

Read on to learn why you should definitely enable this flag in the project you’re working on.

What does it do?

For those of you who know what strictNullChecks does, you can safely skip to the next paragraph.

The purpose of strictNullChecks is to help you write safer code. It achieves that by pointing out places where you could be forgetting that a variable is null or undefined.

Imagine this small example:

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const appDiv: HTMLElement = document.getElementById('app');
appDiv.innerHTML = `<h1>TypeScript Starter</h1>`;

It looks fine. However, what if there were no element with id app? In such case document.getElementById would return null and we would get a TypeError: appDiv is null error. We would learn about the mistake only at runtime. But the purpose of TypeScript is to help you find mistakes during compile time!

Let’s enable strictNullChecks. Now your IDE will highlight appDiv with the following message:

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Type 'HTMLElement | null' is not assignable to type 'HTMLElement'.

What this means is that the return type of document.getElementById is HTMLElement | null and we’re trying to assign it to a constant with type HTMLElement. TypeScript doesn’t allow this because the target type is narrower then the source type.

Enabling strictNullChecks changed the type of document.getElementById to HTMLElement | null instead of simply HTMLElement. In other words, this type is now more honest and closer to the truth. It admits that a null value can also be returned from this method. By doing this, it forces you to handle such case.

If we change the type of appDiv to HTMLElement | null, the next line will compile with the following error:

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Object is possibly 'null'.

We cannot access a property of appDiv because it could be a null. TypeScript forces us to consider the null case. How to address it? It depends. Maybe you need to create this app element. Or maybe in such case it’s better to throw an exception? The simplest solution would be to not do anything in case of falsy appDiv.

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const appDiv: HTMLElement | null = document.getElementById('app');
if (appDiv) {
appDiv.innerHTML = `<h1>TypeScript Starter</h1>`;
}

This works because of TypeScript’s great feature called type guards. The compiler is able to figure out that the type of appDiv inside the if is HTMLElement instead of HTMLElement | null thanks to some static code analysis.

How does it work?

What exactly changed that allowed the compiler to work this way?

By default (with strictNullChecks disabled), the compiler behaves as if every type you use in your code was implicitly replaced with its union with null and undefined.

In other words, null and undefined values are part of every type. Therefore, typing something as HTMLElement | null | undefined was redundant since HTMLElement already included null and undefined.

Converesly, with strictNullChecks enabled,

Objects received from the backend

Uninitialized properties (strictPropertyInitialization)

Exhaustiveness checks

React example - optional property of object passed as prop


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