Right now it’s summarized as “typesafe fullstack monorepo”… But that’s so dense, it’s practically just three buzzwords together. A more realistic description of the pros and cons would be welcome.
I’ve never heard of Hono, and I’d personally need a lot more convincing to pick an unknown framework for a new app.
So the question is whether the target audience here is “people who want to build full-stack web apps” or “people who are already using the BHVR stack”.
If you build MERN apps, this is a template that replaces Express with Hono, Node with bun, and Webpack with Vite.
All of which are significantly faster than their counterparts. Hono can be deployed anywhere and has a much smaller bundle size than Express.
The exclusive gatekeeping messaging doesn't seem very useful. There's probably a much bigger audience for "Hey, instead of starting yet another Node project, why not try this?" rather than preaching to the already converted early adopters.
https://npmtrends.com/react-vs-vite-vs-webpack
Imagine someone posting a project that uses React and then someone demanding they explain what React is...
Hono is basically next gen Koa: zero dependencies and made to work in additional contexts like in CloudFlare Workers.
- Express deps: https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=express (lol)
- Hono deps: https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=hono
Node web servers are all so similar (you write ~identical code no matter which one you use) that tie-breaking on a dep diff this big is reasonable.
Works on Cloudflare, Fastly, Deno, Bun, AWS, or Node.js. The same code runs on all platforms.
How does compare to ultrajs? Or just use hono client side jsx, its pretty much like react already.
You still won’t get auto-generated hooks or WebSocket subscriptions, but for plain REST/JSON the old “hand-rolled fetch” drawback is gone, leaving only edge cases like hooks, real-time, and IDE scalability as the remaining trade-offs.
Why do you need both Bun and Vite?
I'm also curious why you'd need vite with bun, maybe there are some features in vite that bun is missing?
If “bun index.html” works for you right now, then great! Otherwise you may need to go to vite for a while yet.
Vite is specifically used for bundling the frontend and chosen due to the vast ecosystem of plugins that people use for it. Tailwindcss is a great example, others here: https://vite.dev/plugins/
Bun does quite a bit more. In this context it’s used as a runtime and a package manager, and automatically handles the workspaces aspect for shared types. While you might be able to achieve all of bhvr with just Bun I chose to stick with Vite due to the number plugins, tutorials, setups, etc. that all use it. Just keeps things simple and easy!
Fastify is great, I just like Hono more ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do you have a plans to add the ORM?
theli0nheart•7h ago
stevedsimkins•7h ago