ts-to-zod VS ts-patch

You could use something like this https://github.com/fabien0102/ts-to-zod

YES! I've introduced ts-to-zod into my codebase only yesterday, and it's served my needs exactly. It doesn't handle generics or mapped types, but that's a fair price to pay.

It also works the other way, you can define a zod schema and you can infer types for your data from it.

https://github.com/fabien0102/ts-to-zod

The closest that I know of (and I have not used this) is zod-fast-check. It generates fast-check “arbitraries” (test data generators) for property-based testing based on zod schemas. Of course, this requires that you use zod to define your types, which has some downsides. Fortunately there is another tool, ts-to-zod, (which I also have not used) which will codegen zod schemas based on TS type definitions. If you thread these four libraries together you should end up with the ability to write random tests on generated data with very little overhead. In theory.

Okay, that's an improvement! We can use TypeScript's native type syntax to define the interface, and augment it with JSDoc comments for any properties that can't be natively expressed. So, to use this with Zod, we need to convert it from the TypeScript syntax to the Zod syntax. Luckily, Fabien Bernard has spearheaded the excellent ts-to-zod project, which looks through interfaces defined in a file and outputs the equivalent Zod schemata for them.

yup, just found that, super neat, I am 100% interested in using this for other runtime validation...

It's interesting because I've always been under the impression the TS team was against the use of types at runtime (that's why projects like https://github.com/nonara/ts-patch) exist, but now they're doing it themselves with this project...

I recently learned about Typescript transformers[0] and wish they were better supported in a first-class manner. Working with ttypescript or ts-patch[1] is easy enough, but it still feels like you're doing something you shouldn't be doing.

My goal was to pass the Typescript types to the JS runtime, maybe there's a better way and GPT-4 just led me astray...

[0] https://github.com/itsdouges/typescript-transformer-handbook

[1] https://github.com/nonara/ts-patch

To accomplish this, I wrote a couple of transformer plugins for TypeScript. Now, tsc doesn't support plugins by default. (You may have seen plugins in the tsconfig.json for a project, but they are plugins for the editor's language server, not the compiler.) Luckily for us, again, there exists a fantastic open-source package to solve this problem. Ron S. maintains a package called ts-patch which, aptly, patches the tsc installation for a project to allow the project to specify compiler-plugins.