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Comment by kamilafsar | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Phero has a build step. Phero does come with a CLI and will watch code changes, build your TS alongside with an client SDK.

In our experience the latency between changing something in your API, and seeing compile errors arise in the client is just a few seconds. And this only matters when your API contract changes, which is of course not always. Not a biggy in our eyes. In order to run, you'd need to compile TS anyways. :)

In our opinion this is well worth the "magic" Phero adds: it will work with plain TS. No "t.string" like apis to build your apis/models. Matter of taste I guess :)

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Not to take away from your explanation, but this is actually the key point that a lot of developers have been fighting in the last couple of years.

We've "had" end-to-end typesafety with codegen tools openapi/swagger and graphql etc.

However, the big issue with a lot of those tools is that you end up having to manage this compile step.

The real magic of trpc is exactly this point about it being without a compiler, where the types are derived from the very same typescript files - this is what gives it this immediacy and feeling of it being instant and not having to deal with a compile step.

I've always wondered whether we'd get the same benefits and niceties with a really streamlined compiling approach - perhaps something like phero. But it's just a little harder of a sell compared to the built-in typesafety you get from trpc

There is a difference with approaches like openapi/swagger/graphql though.

With Phero you define your models with plain TS. Our code-gen will "just" copy the exact same models to your client SDK. The DX is night and day.

We believe domain models are the most important part of your codebase. We don't like to define them in an intermediate language like graphql/swagger/graphql/you-name-it.

Because we support plain TS as "input" if you will, you can use all features and greatness TS comes with. Like generics, conditional types, mapped types, even template literal types!

fair enough, i can imagine that feeling pretty nice.

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