Skir
like Protocol Buffer but better
Details
- External ID
- 47299022
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Skir
- Website domain
- skir.build
- Launched
- March 8, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 113
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9194341943419434
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Why I built Skir: https://medium.com/@gepheum/i-spent-15-years-with-protobuf-t...Quick start: npx skir initAll the config lives in one YML file.Website: https://skir.buildGitHub: https://github.com/gepheum/skirWould love feedback especially from teams running mixed-language stacks.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche developer utilities and toolchains
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- serialization format improving on protocol buffers
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building an industrial-grade declarative schema and RPC system with cross-language code generators for 10+ programming languages requires deep compiler design and language-specific serialization expertise.
What it would actually take: The architecture comprises a formal grammar parser/compiler (lexer, parser, AST, type checker) and custom code generators targeting C#, C++, Go, Rust, TypeScript, Python, and more, plus an efficient binary/JSON serialization runtime for each target language. The difficult challenges are strict schema evolution validation, backwards/forwards binary compatibility, and writing idiomatic, zero-allocation serialization code across multiple distinct runtime environments. This necessitates deep expertise in compiler theory, binary protocols, and language runtimes.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Protobuf, Cap'n Proto, FlatBuffers, Thrift, MessagePack
Concerns raised: Implicit versioning is brittle for backwards compatibility, Data migration from Protobuf too costly for existing persisted data, Timing—market already has established alternatives like Thrift, Limited language support compared to Protobuf ecosystem, Field renaming in old binaries can cause deserialization bugs
Feature requests: Support for Go, C#, Rust, Swift language bindings, Streaming requests/responses, Introspection with annotations support, Standardized pretty-printer, Proto-to-Skir migration tool
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 36 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #4 of 37 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 125 days after the earliest competitor.
- Protobuf.com, a visual, interactive guide to Protocol Buffers · hn · 2026-08-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Keystone · hn · 2026-02-18 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU · hn · 2025-11-03 · 95 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- I Replaced React in GraphiQL with Svelte · hn · 2026-05-07 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Rapid-rs · hn · 2025-11-20 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- I built a DNS resolver from scratch in Rust · hn · 2026-04-02 · 115 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Afterburner · hn · 2026-06-14 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- MetalForge · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.34
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.