fix: disallow circular project references

[no-yan]

Summary

Improves parsing performance by disabling UseSourceOfProjectReference and adds proper error handling for circular project references.

Background

Previously, we enabled UseSourceOfProjectReference to fix panics caused by circular project references (#574). However, this option forces the parser to use source files instead of declaration files, which is inherently slow.

Furthermore, upstream TypeScript and Tsgo don't support circular project references.
Indeed, running tsgo -b (build mode) on #574's repro produces this error.

Rather than supporting this case, we now detect circular references and emit a clear diagnostic to guide users.

Benchmark

1.29 times faster on aws-cdk

Details

Benchmark 1: trunk
  Time (mean ± σ):      7.260 s ±  0.252 s    [User: 32.910 s, System: 4.898 s]
  Range (min … max):    6.997 s …  7.500 s    3 runs

  Warning: Ignoring non-zero exit code.

Benchmark 2: baseline
  Time (mean ± σ):      9.396 s ±  0.150 s    [User: 41.610 s, System: 7.114 s]
  Range (min … max):    9.243 s …  9.542 s    3 runs

  Warning: Ignoring non-zero exit code.

Summary
  trunk ran
    1.29 ± 0.05 times faster than baseline

Note

Disclosure: I used some AI tools: Codex for implement my plan and gemini for improve my english.

[camc314]

why doesn't the tsconfig parsing/ error matching produce this error code?

[no-yan]

1. This error appears only in "build mode" (tsgo -b).
2. Since tsgolint does not use build mode, this error will not occur.

The reason of 1 is likely because references are a no-op in non-"build" mode.
It remains unclear why files are missing from the program created by tsgolint; there can be an issue within find_tsconfig.go.

[no-yan]

I investigated find_tsconfig.go and confirmed it works correctly. It maps files to the right tsconfig even with circular project references.

[camc314]

I'm a little confused here since the typechecking in the original repro worked?

[rubnogueira]

I was notified since you commented in my other post, but I'm not following your PR.

While I understand that when I run with tsc -b may face circular reference errors, would it mean that it would throw an error for such cases with tsgolint?

[no-yan]

@rubnogueira
Yes, exactly. Instead of crashing, I plan to display clear error message.

[rubnogueira]

I'm not following. Since eslint/typescript-eslint works perfectly, why the need for tsgolint to display an error message and behave differently?

[no-yan]

Thanks for the feedback.

I’m proposing this change because circular references are likely configuration errors.

Project References are option which is used to speed up build.
However, circular dependencies prevent us from running tsgo -b. This means there is no way to achieve the intended build speedup.

If there are valid use cases for composite projects with circular refs that I'm missing, please let me know. I'd love to hear your thoughts!