Comment by ramon156
6 hours ago
The author found out about the square holes in round peg situation with TS. Functions can implicitly error, and there's no annotation that's enforced to tell you that it might error. FP solves this with Result/Option, but this doesn't fit in TS. Effect is there to find a solution but will fail.
Zod is the acceptable middleground in my opinion. Zod will allow you to throw a schema against an object and it'll tell you "yes the result fits your schema". This is fine for most projects.
If you want to go zero-dependency, you can see how far you can get with TS's type system. Branded types are kinda cool. NewTypes are also cool, but also high maintenance. Unless you're building a library that millions depend on, it's probably not worth it.
FYI branded types and newtypes are kind of the same thing, branded types just use a unique symbol that's expressed explicitly.
> Effect is there to find a solution but will fail.
What do you mean?
I'm into Effect from long time and it really scales well the more complex your applications.
Schema is way more advanced than Zod by the way, both at type level and functionality it has a proper decoder/encoder architecture.
You can encode "this isn't just a string -> non-empty-string -> valid email pattern" but a confirmed email the user has clicked on at the type level, by leveraging effectful schemas (and durable workflows if you want).
You may not need it 99% of the time, I myself rarely use that, but it's not a fair comparison.
Zod is more ergonomic, has easier apis and is perfect for most users. Would not recommend schema unless one buys the whole package.
I haven’t used Effect but the problem I see with using it is that it seems to want to completely swallow the whole app architecture. At that point, why not just use a functional language?
I can’t think of a single functional language that offers what effect gives you, though. A fully typed and declarative error channel, managed dependency layer with compile time safety, excellent resource management, the best parsing/validating/serializing library I’ve used in TypeScript, concurrency, streams, cache, otel primitives baked in…
In all fairness it does require buy-in and gradual adoption isn’t perfectly seamless or frictionless, but I think it’s worth it. They’ve done an outstanding job with it.
2 replies →
Yes, your hunch is correct.
Which functional language has a similarly huge ecosystem, works across the frontend/backend, has first class support of different runtimes, provides similar ergonomics, has meetups and conferences in so many countries and is easy to hire for (all you need is solid TypeScript)?
There's a reason effect-ts keeps spreading despite its syntax and learning curve, and I say it as somebody that used Haskell, functional Scala, Purescript, Elm, Racket, Elixir and tested another half a dozen.
Give me an Elixir with properly powerful types (not gleam) and I'm in.
I'd gladly throw effect and typescript especially out of my work day, but I see no sane replacement at complexity scaling.
I wouldn't personally recommend effect without a solid champion in the team and without having the complexity needs for it (I'm talking recurring durable worklows, complex encodings, suspension, retries, etc) and even if you have them the price is steep without a champion, but that's my 2 cents.
You use it for an agentic cli (opencode uses it e.g.) not a simple crud (which is 90% of web dev industry).