how to slim down types of XXL machines?

[boneskull]

My app looks kind of like this:

. my app/
└── root machine logic/
    ├── child machine logic/
    │   ├── child promise logic
    │   ├── child promise logic
    │   └── child promise logic
    ├── child machine logic/
    │   ├── child machine logic/
    │   │   ├── child promise logic
    │   │   └── child promise logic
    │   └── child machine logic/
    │       ├── child promise logic
    │       ├── child promise logic
    │       └── child promise logic
    ├── child machine logic/
    │   ├── child promise logic
    │   ├── child promise logic
    │   └── child promise logic
    ├── child machine logic/
    │   ├── child promise logic
    │   ├── child promise logic
    │   └── child promise logic
    ├── child machine logic
    ├── child machine logic
    ├── child promise logic
    ├── child promise logic
    └── child promise logic

Machines often send events from parent to child and vice-versa. To prevent cycles, I've had to move many types into their own modules.

The sad result of this architecture is that the inferred types of my machines become very large. The worst being the root machine, which looks to contain nearly every type in the entire system.

Here's an gist clearly illustrating the problem.

I didn't notice this was happening until I tried to upgrade to v5.16.0. Now, I'm running into issues where the root machine is simply too big to infer:

error TS7056: The inferred type of this node exceeds the maximum length the compiler will 
serialize. An explicit type annotation is needed.

In addition, I'm seeing errors such as the following, for some of the larger machines (including the root machine):

error TS2742: The inferred type of 'BigAssMachine' cannot be named without a reference to 
'../../../../node_modules/xstate/dist/declarations/src/guards'. This is likely not portable. 
A type annotation is necessary.

I'm thinking I need to decouple the machines, but I'm not sure how to do this while maintaining a semblance of type safety. Maybe that looks like type omitting the actors prop when calling setup(), then using type assertions where appropriate?

My questions:

• Has anyone ever encountered this?
• If so, what worked? What didn't work?
• And what can I--or the community--learn from my blunder? 😄

Ref: #5046 (which I now believe is just "user error")

[boneskull]

After digging through search results, I found out about stripInternal.

If I add stripInternal: true to my tsconfig.json, and use a docstring like:

/** @internal */
const MyHugeMachine = setup(/* ... */).createMachine(/* ... */);

...it seems to get me out of the woods. These machines won't be part of the API surface, after all! These sort of errors seem to be specific to declaration file generation.

I am kind of surprised that nobody has run into this before. Though--if most people using XState are building apps--maybe they aren't bothering to emit declarations?

That said, this is definitely a band-aid; it doesn't address the root cause.

[boneskull]

See #5090 (comment) for another workaround