Wrong class detection with inheritance or am I doing something wrong?

[shibotto]

I'm not a Lua expert, so this might be my misunderstanding. Here is an example snippet:

Why does it say that e object is of type Person instead of Employee? If I copy-paste Person:new into Employee:new it works as expected, but it was my understanding that it shouldn't be necessary with all those "self" around:

[tomlau10]

This has been reported in a few duplicated issues:

• FR: Allow 'self' return type to allow return type changing with inheritance #1505
• ---@return self #2002
• When the subclass inherits the constructor of the parent class, generics do not work (the type of self cannot be used for annotation) #2706

in short The generic inheritance has not been implemented for the time being: #1505 (comment)

The workaround

---@generic T
---@param self T
---@param name string
---@return T
function Person:new(name)
    self.__index = self
    return setmetatable({ name = name }, self)
end

• by using @generic to match the param self, and finally return this generic type
  => then this function can return the type based on caller

Or try CppCXY's language server

Or you might try CppCXY's lua language server written in rust, it doesn't has this bug, and it has better generic support also.
See: #3017

I just tried his server, you have to write the method as

---@param name string
---@return self
function Person:new(name)
    self.__index = self
    return setmetatable({ name = name }, self)
end

=> it can then correctly identify self as a generic type

[shibotto]

The workaround

---@generic T
---@param self T
---@param name string
---@return T
function Person:new(name)
    self.__index = self
    return setmetatable({ name = name }, self)
end

• by using @generic to match the param self, and finally return this generic type
  => then this function can return the type based on caller

Thank you for your time. I tried searching for possibly related issues, but I obviously used the wrong terms. I now somewhat have an idea what generics are and this workaround does the job perfectly.