Instead, we need a way of capturing the type of the argument in such a way that we can also use it to denote what is being returned. Here, we will use a type variable, a special kind of variable that works on types rather than values.
function identity<T>(arg: T): T {
return arg;
}
We've now added a type variable T to the identity function. This T allows us to capture the type the user provides (e.g. number), so that we can use that information later. Here, we use T again as the return type. On inspection, we can now see the same type is used for the argument and the return type. This allows us to traffic that type information in one side of the function and out the other.
We say that this version of the identity function is generic, as it works over a range of types. Unlike using any, it's also just as precise (ie, it doesn't lose any information) as the first identity function that used numbers for the argument and return type.
Once we've written the generic identity function, we can call it in one of two ways. The first way is to pass all of the arguments, including the type argument, to the function:
let output = identity<string>("myString"); // type of output will be 'string'
Here we explicitly set T to be string as one of the arguments to the function call, denoted using the <> around the arguments rather than ().