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Comment by loxs | Hacker News Reader

I will only nitpick on the part about TypeScript not being type-safe enough, where extra fields are possible or wrong types can be sent over the wire.

io-ts [0] completely solves this issue, to the point where I don't think it's less type-safe than Rust in any practical manner. I've been writing apps in TS this way for the past year and I have quite a large codebase in production. The errors you mention do not happen.

[0] - https://github.com/gcanti/io-ts

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I love things like this, but at the same time when I look at the API this library provides, it's not junior-friendly.

Even though I acknowledge it solves some problems I'd like to solve, if I put code using this library infront of a junior developer, they'd be paralaysed, and at best, if they weren't, write code with it that another junior wouldn't understand. That makes it difficult for me to justify introducing it.

I agree in principle, though in this particular case io-ts does not tend to produce incomprehensible code. Maybe if juniors use it, it would, but it's easy to encapsulate the IO codecs in their own modules where the functional style of io-ts/fp-ts does not leak out to other parts of the code and only types can get reused.

That's not an unreasonable concern but it does mean you're writing code targeting the lowest common denominator. That's not a decision free from negative consequences.

Thanks for the link! I'll look into this for my other TypeScript codebases.

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