typescript-runtime-type-benchmarks VS zod

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.

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.

A word of warning: while discriminated unions are very powerful, there's an ongoing discussion on whether discriminated unions should be deprecated and replaced with a different API.

I was first introduced to Zod by Adam Bobrow - a colleague of mine and a dear friend. Adam was sick and tired from JavaScript's brittleness, and about two years ago he started migrating our code base to TypeScript. But that wasn't enough for him. He kept complaining: "What good are my types, if some other service decides to send me bad data and breaks my code?". That's when he discovered Zod.