exocore VS io-ts

I have been working for a few years now on Exomind[1], a personal knowledge management tool that takes the form of a unified inbox in which you can have your emails, tasks, notes and bookmarks organized into collections. I have iOS and web/electron clients at the moment and a simple browser extension for bookmarking.

Its backend (Exocore[2]) is built on top of a personal / private blockchain and is made from the ground up to be hosted in a semi-decentralized fashion on your own personal devices (your computer, raspberry pi, a cloud instance, etc.). It is written in Rust and has iOS, C and Web (WASM) clients. It's extensible via WebAssembly written applications.

It has very rough edges, but I'm using it daily to organize my life. It has also been my learning playground to improve my Rust skills over the last two years (it was on another tech stack before).

[1]: https://github.com/appaquet/exomind [2]: https://github.com/appaquet/exocore

[2] https://github.com/appaquet/exocore

Qué rico. Si tenés chance meté un proceso de code review fuerte, y para el tema de I/O probá a usar https://github.com/Effect-TS/schema ó https://github.com/gcanti/io-ts que les da una solución obvia al tema de "tipos para lo que devuelva el backend", aunque es en realidad mucho más capaz que eso.

My fave is still io-ts (https://github.com/gcanti/io-ts/blob/master/docs/index.md) as I find it more flexible than zod at the ingress. The author is also working on the Effect ecosystem which also looks interesting.

I’ve been using io-ts for this and been very happy with it. [1] It’s similar to Swift’s Coding protocol in case you’re familiar.

[1] https://gcanti.github.io/io-ts/

Yeah, there are a few new concepts and it's not the easiest to pick up right away. The best introduction is here on the main documentation page.

We use https://github.com/gcanti/io-ts/blob/master/Decoder.md which has a very similar interface. It can even be used to mutate the data using https://github.com/gcanti/io-ts/blob/master/Decoder.md#the-parse-combinator.

A good way to significantly improve the reliability of your app is via improving type-safety by moving away from using any to unknown. One relevant example could be when you type your backend responses and when stringifying JSON to using unknown combined with some sort of runtime type checking. It can be done either by using built-in functionality like type guards or using an external library like io-ts, zod or yup.

Usage of TypeBox is similar with io-ts and zod, but it is much powerful and faster than them. Also, TypeBox can generate JSON schema very easily. Therefore, if you're looking for a validator library for new project and not suffering from legacy codes, I think TypeBox would be much better choice than io-ts and zod. TypeBox can totally replace them.

This check can be done with different libraries like: io-ts, typebox, or zod. These libraries allow you to create objects that represent your typescript definitions. Then, these objects can be used at runtime to validate the received data, in addition, you can also convert this object to a Typescript definition to have all the benefits of using typescript. These objects can be called schema validations because they are responsible for the data validation.