Those looking for a more mature solution in this space will probably enjoy SQLc [1]. It was initially developed for Go applications, but over the years it got pluggins for many other languages, including JavaScript/Typescript.
I was targeting Bun because I really like its built-in SQL module. I can tweak the TS parser to look for e.g. postgres.js tagged template functions and make it work for that as well. I don't really see any blockers
I write Bun.sql with raw SQL and no ORM, and the one thing I kept missing was types. You write a query, get back `any[]`, and hand-write a row type that silently drifts from the actual columns. Drizzle/Kysely fix this by moving the query into TypeScript, but then you're not really writing SQL anymore.
bun-sqlgen goes the other way. You keep writing raw SQL queries, just give each one a name.
A codegen step reads your migration `.sql` files, stands up a throwaway Postgres via PGlite (so no Docker) or SQLite, prepares every tagged query against it, and writes a `.d.ts` that maps each query name to its real result type. After that, plain `tsc` does the rest: `user.notExistingField` won't compile, and `display_name.length` gets flagged because the column is nullable.
Nullability was the annoying part. Postgres's describe doesn't hand you per-column nullability, so I infer it from the query plan plus the catalog, with manual overrides for the cases that genuinely can't be inferred. SQLite works too.
The runtime stays 100% Bun.sql, the generated file is the only artifact (commit it), and codegen is fast enough to rerun on save.
It's early (v0.1, built it for my own projects) so I'd mostly like to hear where it falls over.
I actually took a lot of inspiration from sqlx, which is really nice. The main differences are:
- in JS/TS you don't have compile-time scripts that you can run like with Rust's macros, so you need to run a codegen command before running the type checks (disadvantage)
- I had to create a TS parser that goes and finds the tagged template functions with the sql statements, while sqlx has them "for free" because sql statements are the input to the macro itself (disadvantage)
- I use an in-memory Postgres (PGLite) to describe the queries, instead of requiring a running pg instance (advantage)
- I don't cache the statements and codegen for now like sqlx does, something that can be added later
I think they are similar in that they both substitute the dynamic params with no-ops like $1, $2, etc. before handing the sql statement to the pg's DESCRIBE function
[1] https://sqlc.dev/
https://sqlc.dev
Any chance to get it to work with Node?
Unfortunately in my opinion and experience Bun is not really suitable for production. Does it have anything special which makes this possible?
You'll still probably have to manually override some column types using PG comments like: https://github.com/ilbertt/bun-sqlgen/blob/dee757ebc9c38aec7...
PGLite extensions: https://pglite.dev/extensions/#postgis
bun-sqlgen goes the other way. You keep writing raw SQL queries, just give each one a name.
A codegen step reads your migration `.sql` files, stands up a throwaway Postgres via PGlite (so no Docker) or SQLite, prepares every tagged query against it, and writes a `.d.ts` that maps each query name to its real result type. After that, plain `tsc` does the rest: `user.notExistingField` won't compile, and `display_name.length` gets flagged because the column is nullable.
Nullability was the annoying part. Postgres's describe doesn't hand you per-column nullability, so I infer it from the query plan plus the catalog, with manual overrides for the cases that genuinely can't be inferred. SQLite works too.
The runtime stays 100% Bun.sql, the generated file is the only artifact (commit it), and codegen is fast enough to rerun on save.
It's early (v0.1, built it for my own projects) so I'd mostly like to hear where it falls over.
- in JS/TS you don't have compile-time scripts that you can run like with Rust's macros, so you need to run a codegen command before running the type checks (disadvantage)
- I had to create a TS parser that goes and finds the tagged template functions with the sql statements, while sqlx has them "for free" because sql statements are the input to the macro itself (disadvantage)
- I use an in-memory Postgres (PGLite) to describe the queries, instead of requiring a running pg instance (advantage)
- I don't cache the statements and codegen for now like sqlx does, something that can be added later
I think they are similar in that they both substitute the dynamic params with no-ops like $1, $2, etc. before handing the sql statement to the pg's DESCRIBE function
> genuinely
> I'd mostly like to hear where it falls over.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated