Annotate custom check function as assert

[sewbacca]

It is sometimes nice to do some checks on variables such as:

---@param notoptional table?
local function foobar(notoptional)
    assert(notoptional, "notoptional is not optional")
    return notoptional.foobar
end

Note the separation of those two lines, in real code those might be much further apart. Also ---@param notoptional table? is for demonstration purposes only, the value might come from another function call.
This works fine, but when I want to implement a custom assert function:

local utils = require 'utils'
---@param notoptional table?
local function foobar(notoptional)
    utils.check(notoptional, "notoptional is not optional")
    return notoptional.foobar
end

This does no longer work. The annotation for utils.assert is basically the same as for assert:

---@generic T
---@param cond T?
---@param err string?
---@return T
function utils.check(cond, err)
	if not cond then
		error(setmetatable({ err = err }, Error))
	end
	return cond
end

This works fine for assignments, but assert delivers more information, i.e. implicit casting of variables. It would be nice if there were something like ---@special <varname>. I could use "runtime.special": { "check": "assert" } and make utils.check global, but that is ugly. Is there another workarround?

[tomlau10]

I could use "runtime.special": { "check": "assert" } and make utils.check global, but that is ugly.

You can use "runtime.special": { "utils.check": "assert" } then you dont need to make it global.
AFAIK it is pure string / token text matching.

But there is a caveat, if your code is something like:

local utils = require "utils"
local check = utils.check

check(...) -- this won't work, because runtime special is pure token text matching
require "utils".check(...) -- this won't work either

local u = require "utils"
u.check(...) -- wont work ...

[sewbacca]

I swear I did try that, but now it works. I must have written "utils.assert": "assert" and tried utils.check(). Thank you!