Building an end-to-end typesafe API — without GraphQL

First, we all switched back to relational DBs after recovering from an embarrassingly long collective delusion that NoSQL was cool. Then TypeScript started its meteoric rise after years of quiet development. Shortly thereafter GraphQL was announced and quickly became the de facto way to implement typesafe APIs.

TLDR: I published a new library called tRPC that makes it easy to build end-to-end typesafe APIs without code generation, by leveraging the power of modern TypeScript. To jump straight to the tRPC walkthrough, click here.

GraphQL's biggest competitive advantage is that it's a spec, not a library. It's designed to be universal and language-agnostic. If you use different languages for your client and server, then by all means stick with GraphQL! It remains the best language-agnostic way to build typesafe data layers.

But the vast majority of projects that use GraphQL are JavaScript-based. The graphql NPM module has 5M downloads/week vs ~300k) for the graphene Python module and ~230k for the graphql Rubygem. It's not a perfect metric, but the signal is clear.

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