Making IPC Suck Less With Typescript

Revisit of my talk that I gave at the November 2025 HelsinkiJS on making IPC safer by using Typescript.

Slides: https://ipc.bengsfort.dev/
Repo including examples: https://github.com/bengsfort/ipc-talk

In this talk I go through the ins and outs of inter-process communication in JavaScript. What is it? Why would you need to split your logic into multiple process anyway? What sort of issues do you typically face when working with IPC?

I also go through a pattern I’ve used throughout 5 shipped apps that make working with IPC ergonomic, fast, and safe.

Although I’m a bit sick and did not get to dedicate as much time as I would have liked to towards the talk, I wanted to get it recorded while it’s still somewhat fresh in my mind so it can hopefully help others as well!

Timestamps
———————
0:00 Intro
2:22 What is IPC?
5:40 Simple example (Node/Browser)
11:43 The problems with IPC
17:18 Fixing event handling
19:42 Implementing a basic event emitter
24:30 Hooking up the event emitter
27:23 Core Typescript concepts we will use
32:02 Adding types to our event system
40:00 Result of type safe event system
41:39 Groundwork for type safe IPC calls
47:17 Type safe IPC calls API
49:37 Implement IPC requests
55:13 Implement IPC request handling
58:38 IPC API cleanup
59:26 The final result