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Show HN: Guts – convert Golang types to TypeScript

97 points by emyrk

by flashgordon

4 subcomments

by cube2222

1 subcomments

We've been using guts basically since it was published on GitHub (almost a year now), and it's so nice! We have a "custom POST-based JSON-rpc"-style api, so we have request and response bodies defined as Go types, and are generating the whole TS schema from it.
It basically lets you generate typescript types from your Go types. However, it's very customizable - you can post-process the AST. In our case, we have a custom generic Go type that indicates an optional (not nullable) field, and we can easily translate it to optional TS types (e.g. for sparse updates).
All in all, great tool/library, thanks for building it!
Disclaimer: I know a developer at Coder (not the author), who also recommended me guts back then, but am unaffiliated other than that.

by ashishb

1 subcomments

Why not use OpenAPI for this - https://ashishb.net/programming/openapi/? OpenAPI supports a lot of languages, not just 2.

by yatsyk

1 subcomments

I prefer to use Zod or JSON Schema as the source of truth. Then I use QuickType [1] in the build process to generate code in different languages. This lets me share data structures. I mostly do this in Tauri apps to keep the same data shape in TypeScript and Rust. I also use it to define protocols, like for REST APIs.
Here are the advantages of this approach compared to using guts lib: - I get validation with clear error messages. - It supports many languages out of the box. - I don’t need to maintain a custom library. - JSON Schema is well supported in LLMs (for example, with structured output or vibe coding).
[1] https://quicktype.io/

by zikani_03

1 subcomments

Nice, this looks interesting.
Somewhat related is a project we worked on within Golang community in Malawi: https://github.com/golang-malawi/geneveev
It supports converting types to Zod schemas and Dart classes. Never got around to TypeScript and would be cool to see if we could add support for guts

by tombert

0 subcomment

I remember someone telling me at a conference that they write all program types (where possible) in Protocol Buffers, since this guarantees that there's a reasonably efficient way of serializing and deserializing anything that they need to in basically any language/platform that they could realistically write software in.
I don't know if I would go that far, but I kind of find the idea interesting; if everything can be encoded and decoded identically, then the choice of language stops mattering so much.

by PhilippGille

1 subcomments

There's also https://github.com/tkrajina/typescriptify-golang-structs
Which is used for example in the Go GUI framwork Wails: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/tree/v2.11.0/v2/internal/b...

by stocksinsmocks

0 subcomment

That thing was too big to be called a library. Too big, too thick, too heavy, and too rough, it was more like a large hunk of code.

by sshb

0 subcomment