marshal.ts VS zod

zod or yup gets you quite a bit of the way there in practice - when you would reach for a Typescript type, making it in zod instead is more verbose but gives that runtime layer.

But for those who actually want full-stack non-stripped runtime type reflection based on Typescript syntax alone... https://deepkit.io/ - https://deepkit.io/blog/introducing-deepkit-framework - is a really promising and cool project.

It patches the typescript compiler (which pointedly considers runtime type information out of scope) with its own type compiler that emits a bespoke bytecode that is executed in a bespoke VM to communicate runtime type information to both server and client as needed. https://docs.deepkit.io/english/runtime-types.html

And from that baseline, there are very cool things you can do like an ORM entirely based on type annotations https://docs.deepkit.io/english/database.html or strongly-typed RPCs https://docs.deepkit.io/english/rpc.html .

It's very much in the alpha stage, but it's really well thought out - there's a tremendous degree of care the developer is taking towards code cleanliness and developer experience. I'm torn between wishing this project to have a fully funded team and take the world by storm, vs. "letting them cook" so to speak and seeing the developer experience unfold organically. Either way, it's a breath of fresh air into the Typescript ecosystem!

Deepkit (listed in the article) is a fascinating project and really deserves to be more popular.

It also demonstrates that what is being asked for is actually practical.

https://deepkit.io/

Checkout deepkit One of the things it has is a really fast BSON parser, that is faster than the JSON one to my understanding. Interesting work with TS types too

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Take a look at restfuncs then. Or deepkit or telefunc.

Both work out of the box very well with Deepkit. You can either construct your own types in runtime or mix TS types with runtime information. See for example https://github.com/deepkit/deepkit-framework/blob/master/packages/framework/src/crud.ts where this is done

Yes, you can directly use the interfaces and types as is with Deepkit (https://deepkit.io) and the library deepkit-openapi. You get also full route documentation if you use the deepkit/http router where you can use interfaces and type aliases plus validation thpes for route parameters (query parameters, body, etc). It still in alpha, but approaches soon beta.

https://deepkit.io/ may be of interest to you! It deeply patches the TS type compiler to make all types visible at runtime, enabling a lot of annotation-style workflows and dependency injection possible completely within the type annotation system: https://docs.deepkit.io/english/runtime-types.html

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31663298 - it's downright mindblowing that all this seems to be the work of primarily a single developer.

For a less intrusive solution, https://github.com/jquense/yup is a great library to reach for whenever you're defining the shape of a network-transmitted object and don't want to introduce compilation stages.

[Zod Documentation](https://zod.dev/) [Zod Error Handling](https://zod.dev/ERROR_HANDLING?id=error-handling-in-zod) [React-Hook-Form Documentation](https://react-hook-form.com/get-started) [Hookform Resolvers](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@hookform/resolvers)

This is a very fair comment, and you seem open to understanding why types are useful.

"problems that are due to typing" is a very difficult thing to unpack because types can mean _so_ many things.

Static types are absolutely useless (and, really, a net negative) if you're not using them well.

Types don't help if you don't spend the time modeling with the type system. You can use the type system to your advantage to prevent invalid states from being represented _at all_.

As an example, consider a music player that keeps track of the current song and the current position in the song.

If you model this naively you might do something like: https://gist.github.com/shepherdjerred/d0f57c99bfd69cf9eada4...

In the example above you _are_ using types. It might not be obvious that some of these issues can be solved with stronger types, that is, you might say that "You rarely see problems that are due to typing".

Here's an example where the type system can give you a lot more safety: https://gist.github.com/shepherdjerred/0976bc9d86f0a19a75757...

You'll notice that this kind of safety is pretty limited. If you're going to write a music app, you'll probably need API calls, local storage, URL routes, etc.

TypeScript's typechecking ends at the "boundaries" of the type system, e.g. it cannot automatically typecheck your fetch or localStorage calls return the correct types. If you're casting, you're bypassing the type systems and making it worthless. Runtime type checking libraries like Zod [0] can take care of this for you and are able to typecheck at the boundaries of your app so that the type system can work _extremely_ well.

[0]: https://zod.dev/ note: I mentioned Zod because I like it. There are _many_ similar libraries.

Zod is an open-source schema declaration and validation library that emphasizes TypeScript. It can refer to any data type, from simple to complex. Zod eliminates duplicative type declarations by inferring static TypeScript types and allows easy composition of complex data structures from simpler ones. It has no dependencies, is compatible with Node.js and modern browsers, and has a concise, chainable interface. Zod is lightweight (8kb when zipped), immutable, with methods returning new instances. It encourages parsing over validation and is not limited to TypeScript but works well with JavaScript as well.

Zod is a TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library. It helps create schemas for any data type and is very developer-friendly. Zod has the functional approach of "parse, don't validate." It supports coercion in all primitive types.

Link: https://zod.dev/

You can check out their documentation here.

You can learn more about Zod on their website here.

In JS, it's a good idea anyway to use some JSON parsing library instead of JSON.parse.

With Zod, you can use z.bigint() parser. If you take the "parse any JSON" snippet https://zod.dev/?id=json-type and change z.number() to z.bigint(), it should do what you are looking for.

We will validate our input using client-side zod. Zod handles TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference. This means that it will not only validate your fields, it will also set types on validated fields.