alt Hacker NewsSerious question: how widespread and actually used in production is Zod?
Honestly, it made things worse for me. JavaScript isn’t a statistical typed language and TypeScript already is something, where due to compiler issues I just use “any”.
Zod has its conventions and JavaScript ain’t Java.
So Zod is also hard to read and debug. It is type conversion to type conversion - bloat, not JavaScript.
Even Pydantic looks tamed compared to Zod.
So how do you use it? Which conventions? Only for validation at certain steps? APIs?
I stopped using TanStack because it got to meta for me and AI as well.
Tests are needed anyway, I rely on TypeScript only now.
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I use it heavily for form validation on the client and the server and it plays very well drizzle in my opinion. In the past I also used it a bunch for validating responses from a product API as it was not always guaranteed that the data had the agreed shape and we could hence account for that during runtime and surface problems in a simple way.
I use Valibot instead, but it’s for similar reasons. The most common usages are validating JSON requests and reading JSON files.
> TypeScript already is something, where due to compiler issues I just use “any”.
Uh, maybe you're not seeing the benefit due to this. My codebase bans "any" and Zod is great for runtime data validation.
I mostly use it for runtime validation for API responses. Found it pretty easy to use. I try pretty hard to avoid "any" in the code, and it's helped clean things up a good bit, which is crucial as we've introduced LLMs into our workflows.
I don't love Pydantic, though. It's probably a skill issue, but it just feels messier/clunkier than Zod's parsing options.