Could Zod Be Leveraged As a Flexible Equality Checker

[jjhiggz]

Pretty new to open source world, but I can't help but wonder if it would be possible to leverage zod to build a system for efficient / flexible / ergonomic equality comparison and not just schema validation.

I for example have a use case where I have to check if a restaurant from a json string has been changed or not, and I could imagine something like this being buildable.

const restaurantSchema = z.object({
    id: z.string(),
    name: z.string(),
    createdAt: z.string(),
    updatedAt: z.string()
})

const restaurant1 = {
    id: "12345",
    name: "Restaurant 1",
    createdAt: "1/1/2021",
    updatedAt: "1/1/2022",
}

const restaurant1Copy = structuredClone(restaurant1)

const editedRestaurant1 = {
    id: "12345",
    name: "Restaurant 1",
    createdAt: "1/1/2021",
    updatedAt: "1/1/2023",
}

const hasRestaurantChangedAtAll = !restaurantSchema
    .compare(restaurant1, restaurant1Copy) // false

const hasRestaurantChangedAtAll = !restaurantSchema
    .compare(restaurant1, editedRestaurant1) // true

// you could be explicit about ignoring some fields
const hasRestaurantChangedShape = !restaurantSchema
    .compare(restaurant1, editedRestaurant1, {
       ignoreSchema: {
           updatedAt: true
       }
    }) // false
    
// or you could alternatively provide an "only check these fields" 
const hasRestaurantChangedShape = !restaurantSchema
    .compare(restaurant1, editedRestaurant1, {
       onlyCheck: {
           id: true
       }
    }) // false

I took a look at This Discussion, saw how old it was and figured it was worth maybe revisiting with some more thought. I'm mainly just curious if under the hood zod has the internals to support something like this