Ask HN: Which API IDLs would you use?

3 points

3 years ago

The state of competing standard problem seems to be here to stay so I have to pick one.

CADL from Microsoft: https://microsoft.github.io/cadl/language-basics/overview

Smithy from Amazon: https://smithy.io/2.0/index.html

JSON Schema IDL vocab (not a thing yet, and doesn't sound promising at all): https://github.com/json-schema-org/vocab-idl

And I know there are many IDL, but I only pick the ones based on their API related work.

OpenAPI's JSON Schema is definitely not designed for data modeling that's why the generator is a mess.

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I'm personally inclined to Smithy which seems to be the most battle-tested with real and large use case. And there's a better chance to convince my boss "it's from AWS", and generating OpenAPI file from it is also aligned with "standard" vibe.

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