Typescript team has explicitly stated that they don’t intend to extend typescript’s static type checking to the runtime.
Typescript Design Goals lists the following in the section on Non-goals:
Add or rely on run-time type information in programs, or emit different code based on the results of the type system. Instead, encourage programming patterns that do not require run-time metadata.
While on one hand this design goal is advantageous in that the output generated by typescript is very close to what hand written javascript would have looked like. And the runtime cost of typescript remains close to zero, therefore adoption of typescript does not alter performance characteristics of an application.
However, this also implies that for cases when static typing cannot help us we need to separately write validators using a validation library (eg. Joi) which has to be kept in sync with the typescript types.
This post outlines an approach to eliminate this redundancy using the io-ts library by Giulio Canti. This approach has also been adopted by some other libraries like MobX State Tree and Runtypes.
Continue reading Typescript and validations at runtime boundaries