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Building Better APIs Together: Wire’s Open-Source Work with Scrive on Servant

Wire and Scrive collaborate to improve the Haskell Servant framework, enhancing API correctness and documentation, showcasing the power of open-source synergy.

Wire is open source for a number of reasons.  An important one is that it keeps you honest when your code can be scrutinized by anyone, intrinsic developer motivation another.  This post is about maybe the most powerful and least explored benefit, which is synergy across industries by advancing open-source software libraries with other companies using them.

Wire and Scrive have worked together on servant, a framework for writing Rest APIs with extended correctness guarantees, generated documentation that is correct by construction, and many other features.

While Servant already enforces strong compile-time guarantees, its handling of exceptions and errors had room for improvement. So we introduced a new extension: the MultiVerb operator. This addition makes APIs more reliable by explicitly covering error conditions and enriching the generated OpenAPI3 documentation.

This work illustrates how open-source collaboration lets us share development costs while doubling the impact. Immediate wins, like shared bug fixes and improved developer experience, come with long-term benefits: cleaner interfaces, stronger systems, and a more connected developer community.

Our model aligns well with consulting-driven approaches from companies like Well-Typed, who serve multiple clients while contributing broadly to the ecosystem. The key difference? We built this extension together, from the inside out.

This is only the beginning. We’re excited to see how community-driven contributions like this shape the future of secure, scalable software: for Wire, for Scrive, and for everyone who values quality code.

👉 Want to dive into the technical details? Visit Scrive’s tech blog for a deeper breakdown.

Matthias Fischmann

Matthias is a Senior Software Engineer at Wire, where he has been driving innovation since 2018. With deep expertise in functional programming, cryptography, and high availability systems, he plays a key role in shaping the architecture and design of Wire’s platform. He has led the implementation of critical features like user provisioning and single sign-on, and is a dedicated steward of the Haskell codebase. Matthias is passionate about the potential of open-source software to power secure, scalable, and commercially viable solutions.

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