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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I think you might want to elaborate on why this stack is good.

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.

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Koa was next gen Express when TJ Hollowaychuk made it. Used first class promises to have real middleware like “response = await next()”

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.

In what way is Hono better than Koa? Any package can have zero dependencies if you just inline / bundle them in your package.

It was designed by cloduflare for serverless use. There's no dependency on node, as cloudflare is based on web standards, so it was designed around warper for browser-native js modules (Request, crypto, ... hence the low dependency), which is why it integrates well with bun and deno.

Trivial dependencies should be inlined. Consider leftPad or isEven.

Or these Koa deps:

- https://github.com/isaacs/inherits/blob/main/inherits.js

- https://github.com/component/toidentifier/blob/master/index....

When you're building a web server library, you need to care about supply chain attacks because you're the one exposing people to them.

Anyways, that's beside the point. Hono is what Koa should have been if Koa wasn't frozen 10 years ago: a simple `res = await handle(req)` abstraction that works everywhere including edge workers.

Not a dev, but I know what these are. Maybe the post was meant for people that know. Bun / deno new nodejs. Hono new koa new express. Vite new webpack. React still React but most popular.

I appreciate the feedback! This stack does kinda assume you already know what Hono is but I can definitely flesh it out a bit more, and perhaps show some code to demonstrate it.

I mean, I also don't know Bun and Vite. I've at least seen React. You should probably just explain the whole stack.

This is like saying a Java library readme should start with what the JVM is. It's fine to not know these things, but the majority of this comes with the territory. Right now it sounds like you're simply not the target audience. The Github readme includes a link to all of the major bits, so I don't really see the problem.

If you were trying to convince me to build a web app in Java, you wouldn’t need to explain what the JVM is, but you’d need to make a strong argument for why Java is better than the alternatives available in 2025.

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”.

The benefits are very clear to me.

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.

These two paragraphs would already be a much more helpful project description than “typesafe fullstack monorepo”.

If you've never heard of Bun or Vite you're clearly not the audience for this.

Why not? There are a lot of people who use the 2010s de facto standard JS server stack — Node, Express, Webpack etc. — but don't necessarily have the time or inclination to keep up to date with every new project in this space. It's a lot to follow.

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.

Vite is a project with 25M weekly NPM downloads and used by some 9M github repos. It's not an obscure project by any stretch of the imagination. Heck it's almost as popular as React.

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...

You are selecting the frontend crew and making claims based on that. Many of us are not frontend devs just want to wrap an API. At least I do.

> Many of us are not frontend devs

That's fine but OP's template is clearly for devs with frontend skills. No?

Heard not an expert in, parent is right

I had the same reaction to Hono, but now see it has 23k+ stars on GitHub. Learn about a new JS framework everyday!

As to whether or not this is a good thing is left as an exercise to the reader. ;)

Hono is pretty good js a runtime agnostic router. On their site:

Works on Cloudflare, Fastly, Deno, Bun, AWS, or Node.js. The same code runs on all platforms.

https://hono.dev

How does compare to ultrajs? Or just use hono client side jsx, its pretty much like react already.

Agreed - I have no idea what this stack is good for, or how it competes against other full-stack efforts. Would love to know more!

bhvr is the opposite end of the spectrum from the Big Three: Next/Rails/Django hand you batteries, bhvr hands you a rocket fuel can. One Bun binary replaces npm + Node + Jest, Hono routes run everywhere from Cloudflare Workers to bare-metal Bun, and a shared types/ folder gives you end-to-end TS safety—zero extra runtime, zero config. You lose turnkey SSR, auth, and ORM magic, but if you care more about installing, hot-reloading, and deploying in under 60 seconds than about convention-heavy kitchensinks, bhvr is the leanest full-stack starter in 2025.

Why not throw in support for BetterAuth and Drizzle/Prisma behind a feature flag, then you'd have a comparable offering, and not weigh down anyone who doesn't want them?

Thank you for painting it that way. As someone who has normally done back end stuff in Django, having the ORM magic is so deeply ingrained for me. I was about to ask what one should use for an ORM, but looking at the Hono examples is pretty helpful. It looks Prisma is one good example of what I was looking for :D

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