Walrus
Infrastructure
distributed log / message streaming
SHOW HN2025
How HN took it
3 positive, 7 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 5 critical, out of 15 comments about the project. Thread score -0.10.
Idea: 2 for, 3 againstExecution: 1 for, 1 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Fast, lightweight, easier to run than Kafka
From 1 comment
Walrus isn’t trying to replace Kafka, but it does beat Kafka in a few narrow areas. It’s a lightweight Rust-based distributed log with a fast WAL engine and modern I/O…
Barathkanna on HN
Simplified API
From 1 comment
As someone who myself worked on a hobby-level Rust based Kafka alternative that used Raft for metadata coordination for ~8 months: nice work! Wasn't immediately clear to me if…
roncohen on HN
Objections
Data plane replication and fault tolerance unclear for a single-node write path
From 2 comments
It seems that the data is written to only a single node. But if that's the case, how is fault-tolerant ensured? In terms of data synchronization, how is this different from…
aaronrobert on HNAs someone who myself worked on a hobby-level Rust based Kafka alternative that used Raft for metadata coordination for ~8 months: nice work! Wasn't immediately clear to me if…
roncohen on HN
No recovery of redundancy after node failure mentioned
From 1 comment
I see no mention of recovering redundancy of stored data after a node failure.
yencabulator on HN
Benchmarks lack p99 latency and use custom rather than standard benchmarks
From 1 comment
I don't see any mentions of p99 latency in the benchmark results. Pushing gigabytes per second is not that difficult on modern hardware. Doing so with reasonable latency is…
chaotic-good on HN
Requests
Kafka-compatible API
From 1 comment
As someone who myself worked on a hobby-level Rust based Kafka alternative that used Raft for metadata coordination for ~8 months: nice work! Wasn't immediately clear to me if…
roncohen on HN
S3-backed storage mode (diskless or tiered)
From 1 comment
As someone who myself worked on a hobby-level Rust based Kafka alternative that used Raft for metadata coordination for ~8 months: nice work! Wasn't immediately clear to me if…
roncohen on HN
Compare against Redpanda
From 2 comments
For Kafka alternative written in C++ there's Redpanda [1],[2]. Redpanda claim of better performance but benchmarks showed no clear winner [3]. It will be interesting to test them…
teleforce on HNIn the current benchmarks, I only have Kafka and rocksdb wal, will surely try to add redpanda there as well, curious how walrus would hold up against seastar based systems.
nubskr on HN
Questions
How is data-plane replication handled, Raft or home-rolled?
From 1 comment
As someone who myself worked on a hobby-level Rust based Kafka alternative that used Raft for metadata coordination for ~8 months: nice work! Wasn't immediately clear to me if…
roncohen on HN
How is fault tolerance ensured if data is written to one node?
From 1 comment
It seems that the data is written to only a single node. But if that's the case, how is fault-tolerant ensured? In terms of data synchronization, how is this different from…
aaronrobert on HN
Alternatives named
Redpanda
From 2 comments
For Kafka alternative written in C++ there's Redpanda [1],[2]. Redpanda claim of better performance but benchmarks showed no clear winner [3]. It will be interesting to test them…
teleforce on HNIMO for those requirements Redpanda has been the go-to for the last 5 years or so but I agree this is still a nice take and potentially even lighter.
alexmorley on HN
Tansu
From 1 comment
For Rust-based Kafka alternatives, I like Tansu[1]. It at least provides Kafka API parity, and critically also gives users a pluggable backend (embedded SQLite, S3 for low cost…
enether on HN
Apache Iggy
From 1 comment
There's also Iggy https://github.com/apache/iggy Never tried it, but looks promising
k_bx on HN
WarpStream
From 2 comments
For Rust-based Kafka alternatives, I like Tansu[1]. It at least provides Kafka API parity, and critically also gives users a pluggable backend (embedded SQLite, S3 for low cost…
enether on HNThe Developer Voices interview where Kris Jenkins talks to Ryan Worl is one of the best, and goes into a surprising amount of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgzmxe6cj6A…
zellyn on HN
NATS
From 1 comment
Nice! How does it compare to Redpanda, NATS, etc?
oulipo2 on HN