granzymes 3 hours ago

For one, the simple answer is incomplete. It gives the fully unwrapped type of the array but you still need something like

  type FlatArray<T extends unknown[]> = Flatten<T[number]>[]
The main difference is that the first, rest logic in the complex version lets you maintain information TypeScript has about the length/positional types of the array. After flattening a 3-tuple of a number, boolean, and string array TypeScript can remember that the first index is a number, the second index is a boolean, and the remaining indices are strings. The second version of the type will give each index the type number | boolean | string.
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ameliaquining 3 hours ago

First one flattens a potentially-nested tuple type. E.g., FlatArr<[number, [boolean, string]]> is [number, boolean, string].

Second one gets the element type of a potentially-nested array type. E.g., Flatten<number[][]> is number.

For what it's worth, I've never needed to use either of these, though I've occasionally had other uses for slightly fancy TypeScript type magic.

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