# Timber

9 Hacker News commenters recommended Timber and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Lets people serve classical ML models directly to backend systems without Python or shared libraries, and portable across platforms. Critics note inference speedups add little to the whole pipeline.

## Why people recommend it

- Welcomed as a simple concept (3 comments): "Nice idea, i needed something like it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214612)) "the concept alone sounds great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213467)) "I have been waiting for this!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213239))
- Skips Python and shared libraries (2 comments): "This lets you not even need Python, r, Julia, etc but directly connect to your backend systems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214469)) "this approach is much simpler and portable than shared libraries across platforms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213771))

## What people warn about

- Inference speedup adds little overall (1 comments): "optimizing the inference time has marginal benefit in the overall pipeline" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214198))
- Unclear value for full-pipeline owners (1 comments): "if you own the entire training to inference pipeline i'm not sure what this offers?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213671))
- Wants raw input instead of features (1 comments): "Wouldn't it be much more useful if the request received raw input (i.e. before feature extraction), and not the feature vector?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214906))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [MTPLX](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mtplx.md): 15 recommend
- [ONNX Runtime](https://hackerapproved.com/p/onnx-runtime.md): 11 recommend
- [Tiny-vLLM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tiny-vllm.md): 11 recommend
- [OpenVINO](https://hackerapproved.com/p/openvino.md): 10 recommend
- [ONNX](https://hackerapproved.com/p/onnx.md): 9 recommend

## Cite as

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