Honker
Dev tools
sqlite messaging library
SHOW HN2026
How HN took it
12 positive, 20 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 5 critical, out of 37 comments about the project. Thread score +0.23.
Idea: 8 for, 2 againstPerformance: 1 for, 3 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 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
Clever use of WAL file polling for cross-language notifications
From 2 comments
Is the main use case for this for languages that only have access to process based concurrency? Struggling to see why you would otherwise need this in java/go/clojure/C# your…
andersmurphy on HNInteresting approach—using WAL file stat instead of polling queries is clever. Curious how it behaves under high write contention?
davisphan04 on HN
Atomic commit of messages with business writes
From 1 comment
atomic commit with the business data is the selling point over separate IPC. external message passing always has the 'notification sent but transaction rolled back' problem and…
tuo-lei on HN
Objections
stat polling is inefficient and may hurt CPU and battery
From 2 comments
The 1 ms pragma data version polling is a nice way to bypass the lack of a server process. didyou measure the impact on cpu or battery life for applications running on lower…
nawi on HNkqueue/FSEvents is tempting here, but Darwin drops same-process notifications. If you've got a publisher and listener in the same process the listener just never fires. Nasty…
ArielTM on HN
Darwin drops same-process notifications so filesystem watchers fail
From 1 comment
kqueue/FSEvents is tempting here, but Darwin drops same-process notifications. If you've got a publisher and listener in the same process the listener just never fires. Nasty…
ArielTM on HN
Requests
Handle WAL checkpoint and truncation correctly
From 2 comments
atomic commit with the business data is the selling point over separate IPC. external message passing always has the 'notification sent but transaction rolled back' problem and…
tuo-lei on HNkqueue/FSEvents is tempting here, but Darwin drops same-process notifications. If you've got a publisher and listener in the same process the listener just never fires. Nasty…
ArielTM on HN
Support SQLAlchemy and ORM integration
From 1 comment
If I'm using SQLAlchemy, can this integrate? It seems to want to make the db connection itself.
robertlagrant on HN
Questions
How does it behave under high write contention or many listeners
From 2 comments
Interesting approach—using WAL file stat instead of polling queries is clever. Curious how it behaves under high write contention?
davisphan04 on HNThis is the kind of skill-level tool I wish existed earlier — I hit the exact pain point running a daily-chronicle site off SQLite + a static deploy a week ago. Ended up with a…
agentbonnybb on HN
Is stat-based polling better than inotify or pragma data_version
From 2 comments
Couldn't you use inotify (and/or some cross-platform wrapper) to watch for WAL changes without polling?
Retr0id on HNOh cool, so using io uring plus pragma data version would actually beat stat on Linux holistically speaking? The stat choice was all about cross platform consistency over inotify…
russellthehippo on HN
Alternatives named
Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY
From 1 comment
Shameless plug: In the upcoming release of PostgreSQL 19, LISTEN/NOTIFY has been optimized to scale much better with selective signaling, i.e. when lots of backends are listening…
JoelJacobson on HN
pg-boss, Oban, Celery, Sidekiq (named as inspiration)
From 1 comment
Hey HN, I built this. Honker adds cross-process NOTIFY/LISTEN to SQLite. You get push-style event delivery with single-digit millisecond latency without a damon/broker, using…
russellthehippo on HN
AWS SQS
From 1 comment
Awesome. I’m currently using AWS SQS which invokes lambda functions for asynchronous tasks like email sends, but Honker seems like a great local replacement. Any conflicts or…
nodesocket on HN