Show HN: Skir – like Protocol Buffer but better

Quick start: npx skir init

All the config lives in one YML file.

Website: https://skir.build

GitHub: https://github.com/gepheum/skir

Would love feedback especially from teams running mixed-language stacks.

Show HN: Skir – like Protocol Buffer but better
skir.build

The best thing Skir does is strict generated constructors. You add a field, every construction site lights up. Protobuf's "silently default everything" model has caused mass production incidents at real companies. This is a legitimately better default.

Dense JSON is interesting but the docs gloss over the tradeoff: your serialized data is [3, 4, "P"]. If you ever lose your schema, or a human needs to read a payload in a log, you're staring at unlabeled arrays. Protobuf binary has the same problem but nobody markets binary as "easy to inspect with standard tools." The "serialize now, deserialize in 100 years" claim has a real asterisk. Compatibility checking requires you to opt into stable record IDs and maintain snapshots. If you skip that (and the docs' own examples often do), the CLI literally warns you: "breaking changes cannot be detected." So it's less "built-in safety" and more "safety available if you follow the discipline." Which is... also what Protobuf offers.

The Rust-style enum unification is genuinely cleaner than Protobuf's enum/oneof split. No notes there, that's just better language design.

Minor thing that bothered me disproportionately: the constant syntax in the docs (x = 600) doesn't match what the parser actually accepts (x: 600).

The weirdest thing that bugged the heck out of me was the tagline, "like protos but better", that's doing the project no favors.

I think this would land better if it were positioned as "Protobuf, but fresh" rather than "Protobuf, but better." The interesting conversation is which opinions are right, not whether one tool is universally superior.

Quite frankly, I don't use protobuf because it seems like an unapproachable monolith, and I'm not at FAANG anymore, just a solo dev. No one's gonna complain if I don't. But I do love the idea of something simpler thats easy to wrap my mind around.

That's why "but fresh" hits nice to me, and I have a feeling it might be more appealing than you'd think - ex. it's hard to believe a 2 month old project is strictly better than whatever mess and history protobufs gone through with tons of engineers paid to use and work on it. It is easy to believe it covers 99% of what Protobuf does already, and any crazy edge cases that pop up (they always do, eventually :), will be easy to understand and fix.