Curious of the most functional, enjoyable API's you've encountered on projects and why it was chock full of awesome, whether that was ease of use, sensible design, integration of other services, etc.
Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
#2Win32 API
Re: Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
#3The most awesome was SAL, a vector math library by Mercury Systems.
Every function came in multiple varieties, specialized for the expected and desired cache hotness of the data. Suppose you wanted to multiply a couple matrices. There are two inputs and an output. The inputs could be cached, uncached, or one of each. The output might be needed soon, and thus should remain in cache, or it might be better to save the cache for other things. All of this could be specified.
That library could help a programmer to produce mighty fast programs.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
#4emacs
Re: Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
#5Twas down today for brief while, but Stripe API usually is rock-solid
I'd also check out a new trend in APIs that is sort of "visual editors for non-coders". Slack's Block Builder is a terrific example
Re: Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
#6Win32 API
When I saw this I actually laughed. But then I thought about it more. I’m actually inclined to agree with you, for a native API it is quite extensive, well documented, and fairly easy to use. I prefer its verbosity to Unix-style 6-character-long syscalls, though I can see why it made sense at the time it was developed. But it could just Stockholm syndrome after 5 years of use.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
#7Win32 API
When I saw this I actually laughed. But then I thought about it more. I’m actually inclined to agree with you, for a native API it is quite extensive, well documented, and fairly easy to use. I prefer its verbosity to Unix-style 6-character-long syscalls, though I can see why it made sense at the time it was developed. But it could just Stockholm syndrome after 5 years of use.
I'm not really familiar with it, but I do know it went through a lot of revisions in the beginning when just about everything that could be exploited was.
So I would imagine it would be a time (battle?) tested, mature api.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
#8OpenGL
Re: Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
#9Google Guava, Java Collections.
Most Java OSS library feels a lot better than NodeJS (been in JS land for more than 5 years and I can count "historically" stable JS library using my left hand)
Re: Ask HN: What's the best API you've worked with?
#10Google Guava, Java Collections. Most Java OSS library feels a lot better than NodeJS (been in JS land for more than 5 years and I can count "historically" stable JS library using my left hand)
the older i get, the more i appreciate java.