Crate - Design by Introspection for D web APIs

[Bogdan Szabo]

Hey all,

Sharing a project I've been working on for about 9 years now 
called Crate. Honestly, I've been hesitant to put it out there 
for a long time, but it's been running in production, and I 
figured it's finally time. It might still have issues here and 
there, but it works great for my projects. Docs and weird code 
might still be present, so please excuse any issues in advance.

If you've seen Andrei's Design by Introspection talk, this is 
that idea applied to building web APIs. You define your data 
models as regular D structs, and Crate uses compile-time 
introspection to generate everything else - routing, CRUD 
operations, validation, serialisation, the whole stack. No code 
generation steps, no external tooling, just D's type system doing 
what it does best.

The same model definitions work across REST, JSON:API, GraphQL, 
and MCP protocols. Swap one line, and your API speaks a different 
protocol. Storage backends (MongoDB, in-memory) are similarly 
interchangeable. It all sits on top of vibe.d.

It also introspects to generate OpenAPI docs and client code for 
TypeScript, Swift, and Kotlin — directly from your D types at 
compile time.

MIT licensed: https://gitlab.com/szabobogdan3/crate

Feedback welcome.