Show HN: I rewrote the express library to rust

Brahma-Firelight is built to replace Node.js’s slow HTTP layer with a lightning-fast Rust-powered core. It’s written entirely in Rust using tokio and hyper, giving it native async speed, zero garbage collection pauses, and rock-solid stability. Through napi-rs, it exposes a clean Express-like API to JavaScript developers, so it feels simple to use while the heavy lifting—request parsing, routing, and response handling—runs natively in Rust. Brahma-Firelight is pure Rust with a direct binary bridge to Node, eliminating overhead and context switches. It uses a fire-and-forget model that sends responses without blocking, ideal for orchestrators, control panels, and microservice routers. Each worker runs independently, scaling cleanly across CPU cores without shared event loop contention. With structured HTTP routing, no dependency bloat, and single-binary deployment, Brahma-Firelight focuses on raw throughput and developer simplicity 💛

Install

npm install brahma-firelight # or yarn add brahma-firelight # or pnpm add brahma-firelight # or bun add brahma-firelight # or nypm add brahma-firelight

Initialize

const { createApp, setJsResponseTimeout, setMaxBodyBytes } = require("brahma-firelight"); const app = createApp(); setJsResponseTimeout(60); setMaxBodyBytes(50 * 1024 * 1024);

Middleware

app.use((req,res,next)=>{ res.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin","*"); res.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods","GET,POST,PUT,DELETE,OPTIONS"); res.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers","Content-Type, Authorization"); if(req.method==="OPTIONS") res.send(204); else next(); });

Routes

app.get("/hi",(req,res)=>res.json({msg:"Hello from Brahma"})); app.post("/echo",(req,res)=>res.json(JSON.parse(req.body||"{}")));

Cookies & Redirects

app.get("/set",(req,res)=>{ res.send(200,{"Content-Type":"text/plain"}, ["a=1; Path=/; HttpOnly"],"cookies set"); }); app.get("/goto",(req,res)=>res.redirect("https://google.com"));

Listen & Shutdown

app.listen("0.0.0.0",2000,()=>console.log("Listening on 2000")); process.on("SIGINT",async()=>{await app.close(3000);process.exit(0);});

Benchmark

wrk -t4 -c200 -d10s http://127.0.0.1:2000/hi # ~130k req/sec, <2ms avg latency (i5-12450H)

🌌 The Brahma Story

Brahma-JS merges Rust concurrency with JS simplicity. Write Express-style code and run it at native speed — each request is async, non-blocking, and powered by Tokio + Hyper. It’s built to achieve ultimate perfomance in how we write and scale backend code compatible with Bun & Deno — if you love this project, give it a try and don’t forget to star it ⭐.