ts-reset VS typescript-runtime-type-benchmarks

TypeScript's standard library contains over 1,000 instances of the any type. There are many opportunities to improve the developer experience when working with strictly typed code. One solution to avoid having to fix the standard library yourself is to use the ts-reset library. It is easy to use and only needs to be imported once in your project.

You might like TS Reset: https://github.com/total-typescript/ts-reset, which fixes this particular problem. I don't personally find it to be a big issue though.

Regarding runtime type checking, if you were to write something that can handle the total space of possible TS types, you would end up with incredibly complex machinery. It would be hard to make it perform, both in terms of speed and bundle size, and it would be hard to predict. I think Zod or perhaps https://arktype.io/ which target a reasonable subset are the only way to go.

https://github.com/total-typescript/ts-reset <-- this fixes the `(string | undefined)[]` issue and a few other quirks. Obviously it's annoying to need a library to fix quirks, but better than nothing.

Dude is an actual TypeScript wizard, his ts-reset package is a must have when dealing with JSON. He was featured in the VS Code day streams to show off some introductory TypeScript concepts and my big takeaway from that stream was this VS Code extension. Just stick // ^? on the line after something and it shows the type of the line above. Amazing with Prisma.

Personally I quite like ts-reset to "fix" some of the std lib types - JSON.parse will now return unknown. It's then up to you to decide how you wish to parse that unknown (zod, runtypes, io-ts are all reasonable options here). Won't ever be done by TS itself, as generating runtime code is a non-goal for the project.

🛠️ Extremely strict TypeScript - With ts-reset library for ultimate type safety

Ok, answered it myself: it was a perfect use case for ts-reset: https://github.com/total-typescript/ts-reset

Has been heavily optimized, both in terms of its types and runtime performance. Even including the static parser, many types are about an order of magnitude more efficient than equivalent Zod. Early results show it as marginally faster than any validator currently published to typescript-runtime-type-benchmarks, not including more complex cases where (2) would give ArkType a much more significant advantage.

Zod is a bit of an underdog but it is not fast, AJV which is slightly more common can validate and generate types too but requires using JSON syntax, TypeBox offers familiar syntax to Zod while still being JSON syntax in the background.

First, they're not fast (runtime type checking benchmarks).

Aha, so you're using a library in Java for this. You know about libraries in TS for this, there are plenty of them btw, but you don't use them because it's so easy. Express has `any` type for `req.body` because authors don't care about this either and it's so easy. And TypeScript is the one to blame in that you prefer to work with `any` type for incoming data rather than validating it.

It is so much faster than Zod that Zod basically doesn't show, https://moltar.github.io/typescript-runtime-type-benchmarks/ and according to bundlejs, https://bundlejs.com/?q=zod%2Czod%2C%40sinclair%2Ftypebox&treeshake=%5B*%5D%2C%5B%7B+default+%7D%5D%2C%5B*%5D&config=%7B%22analysis%22%3Atrue%7D, it is even smaller. I genuinely have no clue why Zod is this popular in 2023.

TypeBox is a bit different to other libraries in this space where it's mostly intended to be used with a auxiliary JSON Schema validator. Although it provides a built in JSON Schema compiler (which is currently the fastest (not-AOT) runtime validator available for JavaScript today), it's equally intended to be used with validators like Ajv (or any other standards compliant validator)

I do plan to add some direct comparisons to https://github.com/moltar/typescript-runtime-type-benchmarks as well but haven't had a chance yet.

I think it's more of a case of the extremely low performance bar that's been set by the status quo (for even the simplest of validation structures). There's been a lot of focus on the TS type inference, and less on the runtime performance (which actually matters more as it does reduce operational costs). It probably wouldn't be such an issue if the performance was reasonable, but I mean here's the full breakdown https://moltar.github.io/typescript-runtime-type-benchmarks/.

I found a benchmark for runtime performance, but I haven't found any for intellisense/editor performance.