What's Up with tRPC?
What’s good about tRPC?
It does provide some benefits if you just want to build some backend API quickly. It is rather simple to add a new endpoint and then use it in a React frontend with full type inference. The whole context system is also quite neat and can make nested routes quite simple to implement.
What’s bad about tRPC?
It obfuscates the actual network requests quite a bit, making it hard to debug what/when requests are actually happening. It also makes accessing the same API from languages other than TS/JS much harder than just implementing a REST API. In general, I don’t see much added value from tRPC over a well-engineered REST API which can be consumed by pretty much any reasonable runtime. It also seems to slow down tsc quite a bit, making the whole dev experience more sluggish.
It also makes simple things like uploading a file much more complicated, sometimes having to resort to workarounds like base64-encoding a file to send it to the tRPC endpoint. All of this is much simpler with standard REST.
Additionally—though this is harder to quantify—it seems to slow down the TS LSP… a lot. I’m working on some tRPC codebase where my M2 Mac requires over a minute after restarting the TS Server to show type information. Compare that to some standard TS full-stack apps I’m working on (with dependencies kept to a minimum) where it restarts in about a second or so.
More generally, I get the feeling that this is just another of these projects that make simple things just a little simpler at the cost of making other things much more complicated, and I’m not sure whether this is a good trade-off—especially considering that AI coding tools work really well at writing simple boilerplate code.
Conclusions
Gave tRPC a try for some smaller projects of mine, and while it did work quite well, it didn’t feel like much of a game-changer since adding another endpoint to something like Express.js isn’t particularly complicated, though using these endpoints in a React frontend is quite easy to do.
Adiós, べン