Fix crash on type alias definition inside dataclass declaration

[AlexWaygood]

Description

Fixes #12544.

At the moment, mypy crashes on the following code:

from dataclasses import dataclass
from typing_extensions import TypeAlias

class Foo: ...

@dataclass
class A:
    S: TypeAlias = Foo

This is because mypy's dataclasses plugin does not currently account for the possibility of a TypeAlias node being inside a dataclass definition.

At runtime, no special treatment is given to fields annotated with TypeAlias -- they're treated just like normal instance fields with default values. As such, this PR proposes that mypy:

1. Always emits an error on encountering a TypeAlias node inside a dataclass definition (it probably won't have the behaviour the user expects).
2. Infers the type of the field as type[X] in simple cases such as S: TypeAlias = int.
3. Falls back to Any for anything more complex, such as S: TypeAlias = Callable[[int], str].

Test Plan

I added tests.

[JukkaL]

Thanks for the fix! Left a few comments.

If you could avoid modifying the symbol table while still fixing the crash, the fix would be less likely to cause trouble in weird edge cases.

[JukkaL]

Modifying the symbol table in a plugin is a little dangerous, since we can apply the plugin hook multiple times, and the error would generated only on the first run, I think. This might be fine here, but it would be easier to reason about what goes on if we'd just skip processing TypeAlias nodes, similar to what we do with ClassVar below. This wouldn't match runtime behavior, but it would be okay since the definition is invalid in any case. I'm not sure if this would cause other problems, however.

[AlexWaygood]

The theoretical issue with this is that skipping the processing of the node means mypy will construct an incorrect __init__ signature. Given the following (weird) dataclass definition:

@dataclass
class Foo:
    bar: TypeAlias = int

mypy will infer the following __init__ signature:

def __init__(self) -> None: ...

But the actual signature generated by the runtime is

def __init__(self, bar: type[int] = ...) -> None: ...

But as you say, maybe this doesn't really matter that much, since we've already warned the user that using TypeAlias inside a dataclass definition isn't properly supported.

[tmke8]

I think it would be nice if mypy accepted this:

from dataclasses import dataclass
from typing import TYPE_CHECKING
from typing_extensions import TypeAlias

class Foo: ...

@dataclass
class A:
    if TYPE_CHECKING:
        T: TypeAlias = Foo
    else:
        T = Foo
    x: T
A(x=A.T())

but I get that this is abusing the if TYPE_CHECKING mechanism a bit and would be difficult to support.

[AlexWaygood]

I think it would be nice if mypy accepted this:

from dataclasses import dataclass
from typing import TYPE_CHECKING
from typing_extensions import TypeAlias

class Foo: ...

@dataclass
class A:
    if TYPE_CHECKING:
        T: TypeAlias = Foo
    else:
        T = Foo
    x: T
A(x=A.T())

but I get that this is abusing the if TYPE_CHECKING mechanism a bit and would be difficult to support.

I can see the attraction, but I think this would be really tricky to support. I think it would be really hard for mypy to distinguish between TypeAlias used outside of a TYPE_CHECKING block (which it should emit an error for, since it will have unexpected effects at runtime), and TypeAlias used inside a TYPE_CHECKING block.

[AlexWaygood]

Modifying the symbol table in a plugin is a little dangerous, since we can apply the plugin hook multiple times, and the error would generated only on the first run, I think. This might be fine here, but it would be easier to reason about what goes on if we'd just skip processing TypeAlias nodes, similar to what we do with ClassVar below. This wouldn't match runtime behavior, but it would be okay since the definition is invalid in any case. I'm not sure if this would cause other problems, however.

766bd38 is a version of the PR that modifies the SymbolTable, and matches the runtime behaviour.
ffb9935 skips processing the node, as you suggested.

I prefer 766bd38, but I'm okay with either :)

[github-actions]

According to mypy_primer, this change has no effect on the checked open source code. 🤖🎉

[JukkaL]

Thanks for the updates! I think that skipping the type alias is a fine approach -- this error mode is probably quite rare and it is easy to work around anyway (just move the type alias to an outer scope). Maintainability and simplicity feel more important to me.

[AlexWaygood]

Maintainability and simplicity feel more important to me.

Makes sense!