@ahejlsberg last time we talked about disabling this code path for --strictFunctionTypes you mentioned we needed this to avoid excessive recursion for computing the variance digest, is that not an issue now?

It feels strange that the following examples undergo a regression and you lose checking under strictFunctionTypes:

interface Animal {a: any}
interface Dog extends Animal {d: any}


namespace n1 {
    class Foo {
        static f1(x: Animal): Animal { throw "wat"; }
        static f2(x: Dog): Animal { throw "wat"; };
    }
    
    declare let f1: (cb: typeof Foo.f1) => void;
    declare let f2: (cb: typeof Foo.f2) => void;
    f1 = f2;
    f2 = f1; // errors outside strictFunctionTypes, not with it.
}

namespace n2 {
    type BivariantHack<Input, Output> = { foo(x: Input): Output }["foo"];
    
    declare let f1: (cb: BivariantHack<Animal, Animal>) => void;
    declare let f2: (cb: BivariantHack<Dog, Animal>) => void;
    f1 = f2;
    f2 = f1; // errors outside strictFunctionTypes, not with it.
}

At the very least, we should have tests demonstrating the behavior, but I think we can still tighten this up.

@DanielRosenwasser It's because a callback parameter check (contravariant parameters, bivariant return type) sits halfway between a strict function type check (contravariant parameters, covariant return type) and a method type check (bivariant parameters, bivariant return type). I suppose we could say that a callback parameter check occurs only if the callback type isn't declared as method (which you really have to contort yourself to do, as your example demonstrates). I think it is largely immaterial though, it never really occurs in normal code.

last time we talked about disabling this code path for --strictFunctionTypes you mentioned we needed this to avoid excessive recursion for computing the variance digest, is that not an issue now?

Not sure what I was talking about there, it shouldn't matter.

While I think it wouldn't be super difficult to do that, we should acknowledge these cases and add them to our test suite, with and without strictFunctionTypes.

@DanielRosenwasser @mhegazy With the latest commits I've reverted back to using the callback parameter code path in --strictFunctionTypes mode as well, but with a tighter check on the return type of the callback. This means that in --strictFunctionTypes mode we'll check function types loosely only when they originate in method or constructor declarations and aren't in a callback parameter position.