[supermdguy]

How do you guys share types between your frontend and backend? I've looked into tRPC, but don't like having to use their RPC system.

[david422]

I do it naively. Maintain the backend and frontend separately. Roll out each change in a backwards compatible manner.

[jim201]

I used to dread this approach (it’s part of why I like Typescript monorepos now), but LLMs are fantastic at translating most basic types/shapes between languages. Much less tedious to do this than several years ago.

Of course, it’s still a pretty rough and dirty way to do it. But it works for small/demo projects.

[Etheryte]

So in short you don't share types. Manually writing them for both is easy, but also tedious and error prone.

[esafak]

I have a library translate the backend types into Typescript. What language do you use on the back?

[supermdguy]

Typescript, using Zod with Express for parameter validation.

[shepherdjerred]

Typespec is up and coming. Otherwise there are plenty of options like OpenAPI

[programmarchy]

FastAPI -> OpenAPI -> openapi-typescript

[denysvitali]

protobuf?

[piva00]

Protobuf is decent enough, I've used Avro and Thrift before (way way before protobuf came to be), and the dev experience of protobuf has been the best so far.

It's definitely not amazing, code generation in general will always have its quirks, but protobuf has some decent guardrails to keep the protocol backwards-forwards compatible (which was painful with Avro without tooling for enforcement), it can be used with JSON as a transport for marshaling if needed/wanted, and is mature enough to have a decent ecosystem of libraries around.

Not that I absolutely love it but it gets the job done.