Every change here answers one question: where does cereale currently fail
without saying so?
**Vite 8 / Vitest 4 drop decorators silently.** Both transform with oxc,
which does not implement the standard decorator transform and does not
report that. `vitest` prints "0 test" beside a bare SyntaxError, and
`vite build` reports success while emitting a bundle that throws on first
import. Ship the plugin that fixes it as `cereale/vite`, transforming with
esbuild and falling back to tsc — cereale depends on neither. The library's
own suite now runs through it, so it is exercised by every test.
**Legacy decorators died opaquely.** With `experimentalDecorators: true`,
still the default in most existing TypeScript projects, decorators are
invoked as (prototype, "name") and cereale raised "TypeError: Cannot convert
undefined or null to object". All decorators now resolve metadata through
one checkpoint that names the tsconfig setting instead, and reject
application to a method, getter or accessor field.
**Values JSON cannot carry were emptied.** A populated Map serialized to
{}, a Uint8Array to index-keyed noise, a bigint straight through so the
caller's own JSON.stringify threw somewhere unrelated. All now raise
JsonMappingError naming the property path and both ways out. Covers what a
@JsonSerialize serializer returns, sync or async. Circular-reference and
depth errors name the path too.
Also fixed: defineRule on a subclass with no decorators of its own wrote
the rule into its base class, because the base's metadata object is
inherited through the static prototype chain and `??=` found it non-nullish.
The README's toolchain table (tsc, esbuild, swc ✅, oxc ❌) is now executed
by a test rather than asserted, and the positioning leads with
class-validator + class-transformer, the stack cereale actually replaces,
rather than Zod, which it deliberately is not.
193 -> 249 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
BREAKING CHANGE: cereale moves from legacy `experimentalDecorators` to TC39
standard decorators, which is what makes validation rules type-checked against
the fields they are attached to.
class User {
@IsString() name!: string; // fine
@IsString() age!: number; // Type 'number' is not assignable to 'string'
}
Legacy decorators receive (target: any, key: string) and lose the field type
entirely, so this was impossible in v1. Standard decorators receive
ClassFieldDecoratorContext<This, Value>, which carries it. Rules now checked:
scalar rules against scalar fields; { each: true } against arrays, in both
directions; @JsonType against the field's class; @JsonSerialize/@JsonDeserialize
against the field's type; @IsIn and @IsEnum against the field's value type.
17 tests invoke the real compiler to assert the wrong code stays rejected — a
guarantee nobody checks is one that quietly stops holding.
Positioning follows the capability: validated domain objects, not validated
data. The README now leads with the Zod comparison. Cereale does not infer your
type from a schema — you still write the field type and the rule — but it
guarantees the two cannot disagree, which is what class-validator never offered.
Removed
- metadata-storage.ts and its WeakMap singleton. Metadata lives on
context.metadata now, which also removes the dual ESM/CJS double-singleton
hazard. Inheritance merging becomes structural rather than reconstructed on
every read, so the subclass-shadowing defect fixed by hand in 0.1.0 cannot
reoccur by construction.
- registerDecorator, replaced by defineRule(Class, 'field', constraint).
Unchanged: the engine, options, naming strategies, access control, error
helpers, the sync API, and the performance work. 193 tests pass.
Toolchain note: standard decorators are transformed by tsc and esbuild, but not
yet by oxc. The library builds with tsc and consumers on esbuild/Vite are fine;
Vitest 4 uses oxc, so the test runner needs an esbuild transform plugin. This is
recorded in vitest.config.ts and the README, and is the reason 1.x should stay
available for oxc-based toolchains.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
The vitest suite silently ran zero tests: vitest 4 transpiles with oxc, which
does not pick up `experimentalDecorators` from a tsconfig that excludes the
files being transformed, so every decorator-using suite failed to parse and was
reported as "0 test". A vitest.config.ts enabling legacy decorators brings all
40 existing tests back to life.
- Add vitest.config.ts (oxc legacy decorators + v8 coverage config)
- Type-check test files: move the test/demo exclusions from the base tsconfig
onto the two build configs, and fix the strict-mode errors this surfaced
- Stop shipping src/example.ts in dist (it invokes runExample() at import time,
a side effect in a package declaring "sideEffects": false)
- CI: run lint, tests with coverage, build and entry-point smoke checks; drop
EOL Node 18, add Node 24; commit package-lock.json so `npm ci` works
- Add `verify`, `test:watch` and `build:docs` scripts, and an engines field;
`build:docs` regenerates the previously hand-maintained docs/cereale.js
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
Claude