Macro-ts: TypeScript compiler with typesafe syntactic macros (2022)

Re:Macro-ts: TypeScript compiler with typesafe syntactic mac... by jakear on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @05:06AM (#36122695)

TS allows terms to depend on terms (normal JS functions), types to depend on terms (typeof operator, polymorphism, etc.), and types to depend on types (mapped types, inferred types, etc.), but not terms to depend on types. Macros could help there, the real world use case would be things like the classic: JSON.parse<{someField: string}>(...), in which a macro might allow the term to depend on the type (i.e. throw if the line data doesn't deserialize into the type).

This of course, goes against the "prime directive" of typescript and would never see the light of day in the core compiler, which is probably a good thing. But for a hobby project it'd be interesting.

In large scale TS applications of my experience, there's always several places where you're writing out long terms exactly corresponding to types in some mechanical way, but there's no real infrastructure to help you there so it's just a manual process.

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Re:Macro-ts: TypeScript compiler with typesafe syntactic mac... by 9dev on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @10:55AM (#36125603)

> In large scale TS applications of my experience, there's always several places where you're writing out long terms exactly corresponding to types in some mechanical way, but there's no real infrastructure to help you there so it's just a manual process.

I’ve been at this point several times, and for most of the time, the solution was to either use the satisfies operator or remove explicit type declarations in favour of what TS infers on its own, then refactoring the code. This resulted in a leaner, more elegant, and most importantly correctly typed code base. YMMV of course, and sometimes this just isn’t possible, but I believe macros to be way too dangerous for that fringe use case or hobby project - inexperienced developers would jump to introduce them everywhere immediately, guaranteed.

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Re:Macro-ts: TypeScript compiler with typesafe syntactic mac... by oreille on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @11:09AM (#36125771)

Although I have no idea how they managed to do so, someone actually made the parse<SomeType>(someVariable), possible in native typescript: https://deepkit.io/library/type

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Re:Macro-ts: TypeScript compiler with typesafe syntactic mac... by jakear on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @11:34AM (#36126075)

Not native typescript, they hack into the compiler. Their minimal `deserialize` example is also 250kB (!!!!!!) minified. Not really an option. https://docs.deepkit.io/english/runtime-types.html#runtime-t...

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