zapatos VS grapheme-splitter

Requiring the user to define model classes for the "ORM" is a massive pain in large codebases and requiring the user to maintain these is just too much boilerplate. Seems extremely bloated compared to the simplicity of how the shortcuts are implemented in Zapatos or similar libraries where 90% of the code is compiled away for production.

Take a look at https://github.com/gajus/slonik and https://github.com/jawj/zapatos

I’m surprised to see no mention of tagged literals, a much more complex version of template literals. For users they may seem ~like a function call without parentheses. But they do quite a bit more.

Short version: they accept an array of raw substrings and a variadic set of arguments corresponding to the runtime values provided in template positions, each positional value corresponding following the raw string preceding it.

That raw array is more than what it seems, it also has a getter of raw string values for the template expressions. This is what String.raw (also not mentioned) uses to treat those arguments essentially the same way an untagged template literal would.

It’s an odd design/interface but it can be used to do some pretty cool stuff. For example, Zapatos[1], a type-safe SQL library for TypeScript.

My only complaints:

- I can’t think of a real reason for it to be variadic, and this makes authoring them a little more error prone. You should be able to expect one array of strings with a length N, and one array of (type checkable/inferrable) values with a length N-1.

2. Likewise I can’t think of a real reason for the raw values to be bolted onto a weird array subclass. It could just as easily have been an iterable third argument.

1: https://github.com/jawj/zapatos

Do note that if you're using an international language, you might want to check out Grapheme Splitter to divide strings into individual user perceived characters, as opposed to computer perceived characters. Since our text is in English, it'd just add unnecessary complication and an extra step to our project so I'm not adding it in :)

Splitting by grapheme clusters (or the characters the user actually sees): JS doesn't support this natively, so you'll need a library like grapheme-splitter. There's a Stage-4 proposal in the works, though: Intl.Segmenter:

Exactly, and emoji are outside the BMP, so it's not exactly an edge case, but the norm where two code units (UTF-16 double-bytes) are used to make one code point (Unicode character).

And it gets even worse, when you consider that for many purposes you're not even interested in code points but in graphemes -- e.g. a single visible emoji might actually be a combination of 5 code points, represented by 8 UTF-8 code units, taking up 16 bytes.

If you want to split a string by graphemes, you can either use the main dedicated library for it [3], or the relatively new API Intl.Segmenter [4] which is in Chrome and Safari, but still hasn't made it to Firefox [5].

[1] https://blog.jonnew.com/posts/poo-dot-length-equals-two

[2] https://www.contentful.com/blog/2016/12/06/unicode-javascrip...

[3] https://github.com/orling/grapheme-splitter

[4] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-intl-segmenter

[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423593

You’ll need a dependent package called GraphemeSplitter which is required if your font contains multi-byte characters like for ex. Hindi. The package is included in the above repo but it was created by orling.