tsc --types does not support passing no types

[IceCreamYou]

TypeScript Version: 2.5.2

Code

$ touch ./test.ts
$ tsc ./test.ts --types
error TS6044: Compiler option 'types' expects an argument.
$ tsc ./test.ts --types=
error TS5023: Unknown compiler option '--types='.
$ tsc ./test.ts --types ""
error TS6044: Compiler option 'types' expects an argument.
$ tsc ./test.ts --types=[]
error TS5023: Unknown compiler option '--types=[]'.
$ tsc ./test.ts --types="[]"
error TS5023: Unknown compiler option '--types=[]'.
$ tsc ./test.ts --types
error TS6044: Compiler option 'types' expects an argument.
$ tsc ./test.ts --types []
error TS2688: Cannot find type definition file for '[]'.
$ tsc ./test.ts --types ,
error TS2688: Cannot find type definition file for ''.

Expected behavior:
I'm not sure of the exact syntax and no one seems to have done this online, but it should be possible to pass no types to the compiler without using tsconfig.json.

This matters because, as discussed in #11917, the default TypeScript 2.x behavior is to include everything in /node_modules/@types as typings, and this is undesirable behavior for a project of any meaningful size.

Actual behavior:
The compiler fails when passed --types with no arguments. I assume that it also fails with empty --lib, --typeRoots, and --rootDirs.

(Surprisingly, the last command above actually spits out a .js file, but it fails harder on a nontrivial codebase.)

This matters to me because I'm using grunt-ts which only supports the --types flag through specifying an additionalFlags string (edit: looks like it has undocumented support for types but it results in the same error TS6044: Compiler option 'types' expects an argument. error since the config just builds a string that gets executed on the command line.)

[mhegazy]

this a limitation in our commandline parser. it should however work if you have another argument after it. e.g. tsc --types --pretty.

[typescript-bot]

Automatically closing this issue for housekeeping purposes. The issue labels indicate that it is unactionable at the moment or has already been addressed.