Typical is TypeScript with type-safety at runtime
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Spent a week in the break building a pre-compiler that brings type safety to runtime. Still pretty early, but generally does what it says.Looking for feedback, code that breaks it (check out the playground), ideas etc.
HN · launched Jan 11, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 58%) · 0 views
Niche: programming language compilers · 77 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -60% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 77 launches in programming language compilers →
Could you build this?
Partial While basic AST parsing and assertion injection are achievable, creating a robust TypeScript runtime type-safety pre-compiler handling complex generics, unions, and edge cases requires complex compiler engineering.
What it would actually take: A production-grade solution requires deep knowledge of the TypeScript compiler API (ts-morph / TypeScript Compiler Internals) or Babel/SWC plugins to parse ASTs, resolve types across modules, and emit performant runtime validation schemas (similar to Typia or Zod). The hard part is dealing with complex type inference, conditional types, mapped types, and avoiding severe runtime overhead. It requires a dedicated compiler/language-tooling engineer with extensive experience in static analysis.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Zod, Yup, Typia, ArkType, ts-runtime-checks
Concerns raised: Performance overhead compared to native TypeScript compilation, Benchmarks too simplistic (no arrays, nesting depth, type reuse, unions)
Feature requests: Include Typia and ArkType in official benchmarks, Support more complex validation scenarios in benchmarks
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 260 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #156 of 261 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 68 days after the earliest competitor.
- TypeScript 6.0 · ph · 2026-03-24 · 156 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- SharpTS · hn · 2026-01-09 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- Ironwall, a safety-first native programming language and compiler · hn · 2026-06-06 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- typescript-engineering · github · 2026-09-10 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- soml-typescript-types · github · 2026-11-01 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Genotype: language that compiles to idiomatic TS, Rust and Python · hn · 2026-09-08 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- compiler · github · 2026-09-19 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- LemmaScript, a verification toolchain for TypeScript via Dafny · hn · 2026-04-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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