ts-simple-type VS marshal.ts

We use an internal validator library that we infer request types from. It’s similar to Zod (but also predates it by a year).

I’ve also spent some time on a Typescript type to X compiler. My first prototype is open source and targets Thrift, Proto3, Python, and JSON schema: https://github.com/justjake/ts-simple-type/tree/main/src/com...

I’m not happy with the design decision in that codebase to try to “simplify” Typescript types before compiling, and probably won’t continue that implementation, but we have a few internal code generators that consume TS types and output test data builders and model clases we use in production.

After some frustration with the TypeScript schema library ecosystem, I've decided that I'd prefer to declare my types using TypeScript's excellent type syntax, so I can take advantage of generics, mapped types, etc. Then, I'll take those TypeScript types and compile them to whatever alternative schema format I need.

There are many libraries that claim to convert your Typescript types to other formats, such as ts-json-schema-generator, ts-to-zod, or typeconv/core-types-ts. These libraries work by interpreting the Typescript AST, essentially re-implementing a bare-bones type system from scratch. Most do not support advanced Typescript features like generic application, mapped types, or string literal types. So, what's the point? To avoid those limitations, I use Typescript's first-party ts.TypeChecker API to analyze types, and an existing library called ts-simple-type (which I've forked) to convert from ts.Type to a more usable intermediate format. Then, I recurse over the intermediate format and emit "AST nodes". It's pretty simple, but seems promising.

So far, I have compilers from TypeScript type to Python 3 and Thrift. But I plan to add OpenAPI/JSONSchema, Protobuf (Proto3), Kotlin, Swift, and maybe Zod and Avro. Each target language is around ~300 LoC so they're pretty easy to put together.

Repo: https://github.com/justjake/ts-simple-type

Compiler input and output: https://github.com/justjake/ts-simple-type/blob/jake--compil...

Thrift compiler: https://github.com/justjake/ts-simple-type/blob/jake--compil...

Python compiler: https://github.com/justjake/ts-simple-type/blob/jake--compil...

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.