# Skir

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Skir and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Protobuf-style schema language with stricter types and safer compatibility defaults. Critics say migrating persisted data is hard and it still uses numeric field tags.

## Why people recommend it

- Safe compatibility defaults (3 comments): "it offers a good tradeoff between efficiency (only a bit less compact than binary), backward compatibility" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299986)) "the idea is that it is often a good "default" choice because it offers a good tradeoff across 3 properties" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300080)) "+100 there's not reason to allow breaking changes by default" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301458))
- Better type safety than Protobuf (2 comments): "I did it a bit better than protobuf because it generally has better type safety" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322370)) "seems to be a nice improvement over Protobuf" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318723))

## What people warn about

- Numeric field tags remain required (2 comments): "I don't see how the serialization this proposes fixes it without the numerical tagging equivalent." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47307386)) "Obligatory dense field numbers seems like a massive downside" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299792))
- Not enough gain to switch (2 comments): "Moving me off protobuf requires something at least 10x better--that's a very high bar." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301524)) "If Skir wants to be more than prettier syntax it needs concrete wins" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47307457))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [OpenAPI Specification](https://hackerapproved.com/p/openapi.md): 30 recommend
- [TypeSpec](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typespec.md): 11 recommend
- [Swagger](https://hackerapproved.com/p/swagger.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Skir", https://hackerapproved.com/p/skir/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).