crosswalk VS ts-websocket-compressor

The lack of RTTI in TypeScript _is_ definitely a pain but the jump to "must use decorators" and "TypeScript is not a server language" is unjustified. There are many approaches to validation and RTTI with TS. For example, you can generate JSONSchema from your TS types (see https://github.com/danvk/crosswalk for an example of this approach) or you can use a tool like Zod (https://zod.dev/) to declare your schemas as runtime values and derive TS types from those.

Writing your backend in Java or C# comes with its own issues, i.e. you can't share code between backend and frontend.

I built something that sounds very similar at my last company called crosswalk. Open sourced here: https://github.com/danvk/crosswalk

One thing that worked surprisingly well: codegen TypeScript types from your database and use those in your API schema.

Update: I've implemented a simple TS library around this: https://github.com/TimonLukas/ts-websocket-compressor

I will add wrappers for WebSocket/WebSocketServer in the future to allow using this without the library having to support it, like in the PoC with trpc.