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Show HN: PrinceJS – 19,200 req/s Bun framework in 2.8 kB (built by a 13yo)

Show HN: PrinceJS – 19,200 req/s Bun framework in 2.8 kB (built by a 13yo)

31 comments

·November 17, 2025

Hey HN,

I'm 13, from Nigeria, and I just released PrinceJS — the fastest web framework for Bun right now.

• 19,200 req/s (beats Hono/Elysia/Express) • 2.8 kB gzipped • Tree-shakable (cache, AI, email, cron, SSE, queue, test, static...) • Zero deps. Zero config.

Built in < 1 week. No team. Just me and Bun.

Try it: `bun add princejs` GitHub: https://github.com/MatthewTheCoder1218/princejs Docs: https://princejs.vercel.app

Brutal feedback welcome. What's missing?

– @Lil_Prince_1218

lioeters

Great job with building and releasing a project. The API looks intuitive, almost the same as Express. Documentation site is good! The animated code blocks is nice on front page but too distracting in the docs itself, I think.

A potential user would want to know: why is it faster? What's the compromise, if any. What specific quantifiable technical points make it faster than other libraries. Benchmarks and tests.

Overall the library feels like a polished open-source project, good attention to design and detail. Definitely valuable as part of a portfolio/resume. Keep going!

dlisboa

I know it's intentional but very amusing name considering the country of origin.

alexfoo

It’s almost certainly not because of the advance fee scam.

You don’t have to meet many Nigerians before you find one that claims to be some kind of a Prince back home.

Nigeria used to be hundreds/thousands of separate kingdoms and many people have a claim to be chiefs/kings of those historic kingdoms. Male descendants of such leaders will claim the unofficial title of Prince. They may not have any real national standing but such leaders will be respected by their local communities.

It may look like one big country but there’s no official single royal family (unsurprising since it is a Republic). To give an idea of the diversity of Nigeria consider the fact that the country has over 500 native languages that are actively spoken.

ricardobeat

Nice work! Some notes:

1. File size is a commonly highlighted metric for JS frameworks because of network transfer cost on the client side. For node/bun/deno frameworks, it isn't very relevant, especially the gzipped size.

2. In the benchmark, the number for all frameworks is quite low - I get closer to 80-100k req/s with Bun on my 3-year old machine. Might be worth using a standard VM size in a cloud provider to make it more meaningful.

3. "Cron" scheduling doesn't seem to belong in the library. This won't be very useful for real-world use cases, as soon as you have >1 node running a server you'll need some form of coordination. More size reduction :)

ricardobeat

some more after reading the source:

- JWT needs to be validated, as it is, your implementation[1] happily accepts anything, you can impersonate anyone you want. I'd argue that it's a bad default choice too [2]

- baking-in resend.com as email provider is unlikely to be useful for most people

- x-forwarded-for [3] is only added by proxy servers, and will often not be present. This means you'll be applying a shared rate limit to most of your users

- the 'ai' helper is missing from the code. If this is vibe-coded, having tests for the examples will help keep it cohesive

Sorry if this is a lot, I hope it can help.

[1] https://github.com/MatthewTheCoder1218/princejs/blob/main/sr...

[2] https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/03/jwt-json-web-tokens-is-ba...

[3] https://github.com/MatthewTheCoder1218/princejs/blob/main/sr...

lxe

Object.defineProperty on every request to set params / query / body is probably slower than regular property assignment.

Also parsing the body on every request without the ability to change it could hurt performance (if you're going for performance that is as a primary factor).

I wonder if the trie-based routing is actually faster than Elysia in precompile mode set to enabled?

Overall, this is a nice wrapper on top of bun.serve, structured really well. Code is easy to read and understand. All the necessary little things taken care of.

The dev experience of maintaining this is probably a better selling point than performance.

swiftcoder

Congrats! That's a sleek framework.

Would love to see the benchmarks checked into source control somewhere so folks can reproduce them.

Can't say I'm the biggest fan of the way the sample code types itself out character-by-character. Took a while for the longer samples to finish typing themselves out.

jryan49

Agree get rid of the character-by-character animation. It's very annoying.

a-dub

this is pretty fun, slick to think you can do things like this now and it will be performant: https://github.com/MatthewTheCoder1218/princejs/blob/main/sr...

interesting to dig deep into the bun runtime (it's in zig) to see how this remains efficient. it's a heap: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/509a97a43516fe4f6d4ff400...

of these: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/509a97a43516fe4f6d4ff400...

pretty cool clean and simple code for the framework (and bun).

jryan49

Considering this is barely any code at all I imagine it doesn't provide anywhere near the feature set other web frameworks do. Also there are no tests. How do you know it even works properly? Why would I trust that it works properly?

jryan49

I do want to applaud your efforts, especially at your age. Add some tests, and keep making things :)

Alex_L_Wood

This is pretty impressive, wow! I always wanted to build a toy HTTP requests framework just to better understand the tools I’m working with, and here you are building the full thing.

silvestreh

This is really interesting, but I'd absolutely love if you could add a light theme to your website. I really can't read on a dark background, it kinda hurts my eyes and when I take my eyes off the screen I see a bunch of horizontal lines for a minute or so.

leeoniya

i was initially confused how 19.2K rps is notable when Express typically benchmarks around 15K rps [1].

however, the author is benchmarking a route with an id param here, not a static route.

[1] https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets/discussions/1415

bitwize

Is from Nigeria

Has "Prince" in his HN nick and framework name

I smell either a rat, or an incredibly meme-savvy kid who leaned into the joke.

Anyways, congrats and keep on hacking!

ramon156

Impressive stuff! I see you have contributions startins 2023, does that mean you started programming at 11?