TypeScript-wiki VS typebox

What's prompted me to look at this is my tRPC+Zod editor experience at work has become unusable. 2-3 seconds to just get autocompletion options on a tRPC path, and then another 2-3 for the next path, repeat. When investigated using TypeScript's tracing tools the data entirely points back to my team's Zod DTOs. What I learned is that Zod's performance is okay at the start, but when you start using methods like .extend/.pick/.omit (and so on) the performance regresses in the order of a magnitude. Rather than making this into a "Zod considered bad" post, I wanted to investigate how the alternatives which can be integrated with tRPC fare, and see whether I can do better.

When you can write a busy beaver machine in the type system, LOC ceases to be a good indicator or how long something should take to typecheck, imo. If you're frustrated with your build, you should use the trace tools on the TS wiki[1] to track down what types are slow to check, so you can attribute the slowness to the appropriate library authors/yourself and decide for yourself if the speed/correctness tradeoff they've made is right for you.

[1]https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript-wiki/blob/main/Perfo...

Good spot to start: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript-wiki/blob/main/Performance-Tracing.md

So I want to update my (very large*) project from TypeScript 2.3.3 to the latest version, and I know that a breaking changes doc exists.

The documentation can be found here.

So far I like the commonly used approach in the Typescript community best:

1. Create your Schema using https://zod.dev or https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox

2. Generate your Types from the schema. It's very simple to create partial or composite types, e.g. UpdateModel, InsertModels, Arrays of them, etc.

3. Most modern Frameworks have first class support for validation, like is a great example Fastify (with typebox). Just reuse your schema definition.

That is very easy, obvious and effective.

There's a ton of schema validators out there and most devs have their personal favorite. Mine was zod and is now typebox + ajv.

If you're willing to document your API with an OpenAPI schema, then it should be possible to generate TypeScript types based on the OpenAPI schema with something like openapi-typescript. Also, Typebox can generate JSON schemas, maybe it can be used to generate something that the front-end can also use?

Well, I do provide extensibility for those bullet points you've listed to varying degrees (both schema and type representation), as well as offering a reference implementation for expressing a entirely different schema specification under the type system (specifically RFC8927 / JSON Type Definition). Reference implementation here. As for JSDoc, It's supported in code hints.

In setting out to build this service, we wanted to use gRPC for its APIs. We’ve been reaching for REST when building APIs so far, primarily out of necessity, i.e., our public APIs needed auto-generated client SDKs and docs for developers working with them. We built those APIs with Fastify and Typebox but felt burned by a code-first approach to generating an OpenAPI spec. I’ll spare you the details and save that experience/learning for another article. Suffice it to say we love gRPC’s schema-first approach. This blog post summarizes our feelings well