Zod v4.5 adds schema compilation (3-9x faster validation) | Hacker News Reader

Zod v4.5 adds schema compilation (3-9x faster validation)

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22 pointsbirdculture6 comments

Serious question: how widespread and actually used in production is Zod?

Honestly, it made things worse for me. JavaScript isn’t a statistical typed language and TypeScript already is something, where due to compiler issues I just use “any”.

Zod has its conventions and JavaScript ain’t Java.

So Zod is also hard to read and debug. It is type conversion to type conversion - bloat, not JavaScript.

Even Pydantic looks tamed compared to Zod.

So how do you use it? Which conventions? Only for validation at certain steps? APIs?

I stopped using TanStack because it got to meta for me and AI as well.

Tests are needed anyway, I rely on TypeScript only now.

I mostly use it for runtime validation for API responses. Found it pretty easy to use. I try pretty hard to avoid "any" in the code, and it's helped clean things up a good bit, which is crucial as we've introduced LLMs into our workflows.

I don't love Pydantic, though. It's probably a skill issue, but it just feels messier/clunkier than Zod's parsing options.

    TypeScript already is something, where due to compiler issues I just use “any”.

Why use TypeScript at all?

    So Zod is also hard to read and debug.

Rebuttal: no it is not. Poorly written code is hard to read and debug; TypeScript in particular is hard to read and debug when you explicitly type things as `any`.

I use it heavily for form validation on the client and the server and it plays very well drizzle in my opinion. In the past I also used it a bunch for validating responses from a product API as it was not always guaranteed that the data had the agreed shape and we could hence account for that during runtime and surface problems in a simple way.

I use Valibot instead, but it’s for similar reasons. The most common usages are validating JSON requests and reading JSON files.

> TypeScript already is something, where due to compiler issues I just use “any”.

Uh, maybe you're not seeing the benefit due to this. My codebase bans "any" and Zod is great for runtime data validation.

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