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sethaurus | 2 months ago

It doesn't matter if a library is written in TS or JS; you cannot meaningfully protect against other code calling you incorrectly.

Sure, you can check if they gave you a string instead of a number. But if you receive an array of nested objects, are you going to traverse the whole graph and check every property? If the caller gives you a callback, do you check if it returns the correct value? If that callback itself returns a function, do you check that function's return type too? And will you check these things at every single function boundary?

This kind of paranoid runtime type-checking would completely dominate the code, and nobody does it. Many invariants which exist at compile-time cannot be meaningfully checked at runtime, even if you wanted to. All you can do is offer a type-safe interface, trust your callers to respect it, and check for a few common mistakes at the boundary. You cannot protect your code against other code calling it incorrectly, and in practice nobody does. This is equally true for JS and TS.

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