Show HN: Fern, a language for defining REST APIs that compiles into OpenAPI
Hi HN, this is Danny, Deep, and Zach. We built Fern after our previous ed tech startup failed. We were frustrated with how much time we spent writing “API code” instead of working on the actual product. We tried to use OpenAPI but we were underwhelmed - the generated code wasn’t idiomatic and it still required manual work (custom templates, scripts, manually publishing SDKs to registries). The Fern compiler takes your API as input and invokes generators that output things like: SDKs, server code, a Postman collection, and an OpenAPI spec. Some technical highlights about the compiler + generators: - The compiler (available as a CLI) handles syntactic + semantic validation. It also includes a linter that encodes best practices. If your API Definition compiles, you can have high confidence that the SDKs will generate correctly. - After all the parsing and validation, the compiler outputs an
Why it failed
Hi HN, this is Danny, Deep, and Zach. We built Fern after our previous ed tech startup failed. We were frustrated with how much time we spent writing “API code” instead of working on the actual product. We tried to use OpenAPI but we were underwhelmed - the generated code wasn’t
- Kind
- startup
- Status
- Shut down
- Inventor
- zachkirsch
- Ended
- 2023
- Source
- hackernews