The template type-checker would generate a statement with a call
expression for all DOM elements in a template of the form:
```
const _t1 = document.createElement("div");
```
Profiling has shown that this is a particularly expensive call to
perform type inference on, as TypeScript needs to perform signature
selection of `Document.createElement` and resolve the exact type from
the `HTMLElementTagNameMap`. However, it can be observed that the
statement by itself does not contribute anything to the type-checking
result if `_t1` is not actually used anywhere, which is only rarely the
case---it requires that the element is referenced by its name from
somewhere else in the template. Consequently, the type-checker can skip
generating this statement altogether for most DOM elements.
The effect of this optimization is significant in several phases:
1. Less type-check code to generate
2. Less type-check code to emit and parse again
3. No expensive type inference to perform for the call expression
The effect on phase 3 is the most significant here, as type-checking is
not currently incremental in the sense that only phases 1 and 2 can
be reused from a prior compilation. The actual type-checking of all
templates in phase 3 needs to be repeated on each incremental
compilation, so any performance gains we achieve here are very
beneficial.
PR Close#38418
f42e6ce917