DEV Community

Shayam Murali
Shayam Murali

Posted on • Edited on

Brahma-JS: Ultra-Low Latency JS Framework Powered by Rust

Rust is amazing for speed, safety, and stability — but let’s be real: most JS/TS devs don’t want to wrangle the borrow checker, strict type system, and ownership rules just to build APIs.

That’s why I built Brahma-JS — an ultra-low latency runtime written in Rust on top of Tokio + Hyper, but plug-and-play with Node, Deno, and Bun.

🚀 Why v1.5?

The first version (v1) of Brahma-JS was a minimal prototype. It proved that Rust + JS could hit crazy speeds with a simple API, but it wasn’t ergonomic for building real services.

Brahma-JS v1.5 changes that:

  • ✅ Express-like API (middleware, routes, responses)
  • ✅ Rust-level performance (Tokio + Hyper under the hood)
  • ✅ Async Support (Async support with oneshot implementation)

In short: v1 proved the concept, v1.5 makes it practical.

⚡ Benchmarks

On a tiny AWS EC2 t2.micro (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM):

Framework Requests (10s) Notes
uWebSockets.js 456k C++ core, fastest overall
Brahma-JS 413k Rust-powered — impressively close
Fastify 307k High-performance JS framework
Express.js 54k* Thousands of failures

* Express fell significantly behind under load.

👉 On the same hardware, Brahma-JS v1 hit ~33.2k req/s sustained throughput.

👉 That’s Rust speed, with a JS developer experience.

🛠 Brahma-JS v1 (The Prototype)

Super minimal — no middleware, no fancy routing. Just raw speed.

const { useBrahma, startServer, redirect } = require("brahma-firelight");

useBrahma((req) => {
  if (req.path === "/hi") {
    return {
      headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json" },
      status: 200,
      body: JSON.stringify({ message: "Hello World from Brahma-JS v1!" }),
    };
  }

  if (req.path === "/bye") {
    return redirect("https://example.com");
  }

  return {
    status: 404,
    body: "Route not found",
  };
});

const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;
const host = process.env.HOST || "0.0.0.0";

startServer(host, +port).then(() => {
  console.log(`🌀 Brahma-JS v1 running at http://${host}:${port}`);
});
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

⚠️ Great for raw experiments. But real-world APIs need more flexibility.

🛠 Brahma-JS v1.5 (The Upgrade)

Now with Express-style API, middleware, async support, and JSON helpers:

npm install brahma-firelight@latest
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 
const { createApp } = require("brahma-firelight");

const app = createApp();

// utils.js
function sleep(ms) {
  return new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
}

app.get("/hi", (req, res) => {
  res.json({ message: "Hello World from Brahma-JS!" });
});

// // Async handler returning an object
app.get("/time", async (req) => {
  await sleep(20000);
  return {
    status: 400,
    headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json" },  // Custom RESPONSE
    body: JSON.stringify({ now: Date.now() }),
  };
});

// To send HTML response
app.get("/page", (req, res) => {
  res.html(`<h1>Hello HTML</h1><p>Served by Brahma-JS id: ${req.reqId}</p>`);
});

// to return body no overhead very fast as text
app.post("/json", (req, res) => {
  res.text(req.body);
});

app.post("/submit", (req, res) => {
  let formData = JSON.parse(req.body);
  console.log("bodyData:", formData);
  res.json(formData, 201); // return the JSON response with http-status-code
});

app.get("/redirect", (req, res) => {
  res.redirect("https://google.com");
});

app.listen("0.0.0.0", 2000, () => {
  console.log("Server listening on port 2000");
});
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

👉 Same “Hello World” — but with the ergonomics you expect from Express,

and the performance only Rust can deliver.

🔍 More Examples in v1.5

Async Fetch 

app.get("/data", async (req, res) => {
  const result = await fetch("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1")
    .then(r => r.json());
  res.json({ result });
});
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Middleware + Delay 

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  req.startTime = Date.now();
  next();
});

app.get("/delay", async (req, res) => {
  await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 200));
  res.json({ elapsed: Date.now() - req.startTime });
});
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

📊 Learn More

🙌 Feedback Welcome

  • Try it in your API/microservice projects.
  • Share your benchmarks & ideas.
  • Help shape where Brahma-JS goes next.

✨ Write JavaScript. Run at Rust speed. ⚡

Top comments (2)

Collapse
 
dariomannu profile image
Dario Mannu •

Interesting... can this work on something like Stackblitz, by any chance?
It would be great if it could, as a one-click kind of playground...

Collapse
 
shayam_murali_df5e02abc08 profile image
Shayam Murali •

You can run the code in github codespaces. Since stackblitz is light weight it does not support running native addons directly. Try switching to github code spaces. Now i made a major upgrade v1.5 removing v2. This update is much stable and almost scored high throughputs compared to bun elysia and fastify in cluster mode. You can give a try by starting npm i brahma-firelight.
refer here // github.com/Shyam20001/rsjs