The discussion centers on AWS's release of an AI-generated local emulator, with users debating its utility as a replacement for LocalStack versus skepticism about its maturity and long-term maintenance. Strong disagreement exists regarding whether the tool is a polished production asset or a hastily assembled experiment lacking critical features like IAM emulation and state reset capabilities.
263 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4smithy-lang
smithy
Java2020–2022
smithy-lang / smithy
smithy
Smithy is a protocol-agnostic interface definition language and set of tools for generating clients, servers, and documentation for any programming language.
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Smithy is a protocol-agnostic interface definition language and set of tools for generating clients, servers, and documentation for any programming language.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-06-29 00:35:28 UTC to 2022-10-16 07:54:08 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2020 | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Jul 2020 | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2020 | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2020 | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2020 | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2020 | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2020 | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2021 | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2021 | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2021 | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2021 | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Jun 2021 | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2021 | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2021 | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2021 | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2021 | 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2021 | 2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2021 | 2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2022 | 2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2022 | 2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2022 | 2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2022 | 2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2022 | 2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2022 | 2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2022 | 2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2022 | 2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2022 | 2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesWIwizwit999·Oct 16, 2022
Also check out Smithy from AWS (https://github.com/awslabs/smithy), the code it generates is much better. It's influenced by the new AWS SDKs so it has generator support for Rust.
In OpenAPI Generator allows generation of API client libraries from OpenAPI SpecsFor curiosity and testing what I learned from CocoR https://ssw.jku.at/Research/Projects/Coco/ I created a parser for Smithy that anyone can see/use here https://github.com/awslabs/smithy/issues/793 , also include a transformed ABNF IDL to an EBNF accepted by https://www.bottlecaps.de/rr/ui
In Smithy: A language for defining services and SDKsSmithy today doesn't support any serialization formats that require fixed ordering. We do recommend that any additional members added to structures are added at the end to help with C++ and Rust codegen though.
That said, traits can be used in Smithy to enforce constraints on structures, so if you ever needed explicit indexing like that, it could be done via traits and protocols (Smithy's nomenclature for describing how clients and servers communicate). In fact, protocols are defined by traits, and traits can enforce requirements on the rest of the model using a DSL called selectors... Probably way too much info other than -- it's possible and easy to support this in Smithy if it's ever needed.
As for required vs optional -- today it's treated as server-side validation only and not used in client codegen. This allows service teams to rem
Read the rest
ove the required trait from members if something ends up needing to be optional in future without breaking clients. We're working on some ideas too to see if we can generate even better code for SDKs in languages like Rust where optionality is very explicit, but without sacrificing the ability of being able to remove the required trait.
And, in general, backward compatibility issues are caught with Smithy diff, which also supports custom rules: https://github.com/awslabs/smithy/tree/main/smithy-diff
Hasn't that been done? Efforts like Amazon's Ion come to mind, or Google's Protocol Buffers & FlatBuffers.
http://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/
https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers
https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/
ProtoBuf requires a schema for the document to be known ahead of time and involves deserialization; Ion is more like JSON in that it's self-describing, but has a rich set of data types as well as annotations on fields to further describe meaning. FlatBuffers requires a schema and provides access to the without parsing/unpacking.
On the other hand, if you're building a service and specifying its interface, rather than just specifying a data format, then there are tools like Smithy, gRPC, and Thrift.
https://github.com/awslabs/smithy
https://grpc.io/
https://thrift.apache.org/
In Building a high performance JSON parser