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Tunstack

Tunstack (derived from Tunnel Stack) is a tech stack that optimizes for product development & iteration speed by focusing on end-to-end type safety, code shareability, and TypeScript-native logic.

Core Technologies

Principles & Features

  1. TypeScript should be the primary programming language and used whenever possible. Introducing a second programming language to a codebase significantly harms code shareability and maintainability. In addition to programming languages, domain-specific languages such as SQL and GraphQL are also avoided, as they often require code generation scripts to integrate nicely with TypeScript (we see this with SQL migrations which are often a pain to write and test). Instead, Tunstack uses MongoDB as its database because MongoDB makes it possible to directly use TypeScript code for database logic, including defining data schemas and schema migrations.

  2. As an application-oriented stack, Tunstack uses custom modifications using auto-generated patch files to core tooling (e.g. TypeScript) that are optimized for application development. Instead of working within the limitations of tooling, Tunstack augments existing tools and optimizes them for application development using a low-maintenance and low-overhead approach of generating patch files.

  3. Sharing code across monorepo packages should be as easy as sharing code across files. TypeScript's out-of-the-box support for monorepos has some significant shortcomings:

  • TypeScript doesn't support dynamic path aliases (such as making ~ aliased to the root of the monorepo package the file is located in)
  • TypeScript project references don't support cyclic monorepo dependencies (and neither does monorepo tooling such as turborepo)
  • Every new monorepo package incurs a significant performance penalty on type checking speed

To solve these issues, Tunstack uses a single tsconfig.json file in the root of the monorepo and patches the TypeScript compiler to support dynamic path aliases. This way, every new monorepo package is equivalent to adding a new folder in a TypeScript project, leading to significant gains in developer ergonomics (cyclic package dependencies are supported!) and type checking performance.