PicoMQ
Data
streaming message broker
SHOW HN2026
159points
31comments
#397of 4,366 in 2026
Top 10%of 2026 by points
How HN took it
LovedMost comments that take a side are positive
6 positive, 7 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 0 critical, out of 14 comments about the project. Thread score +0.35.
Idea: 2 for, 0 againstDesign: 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
Single binary with embedded admin dashboard
From 2 comments
Awesome work on this, The "one binary" approach with an embedded admin dashboard makes the barrier to entry delightfully low. Since you mentioned nodes are stateless and you have…
Farrynet on HNPicoMQ looks worth experimenting with during your prototype phase, especially because it is designed to run as a single binary and supports a relatively simple HTTP-based model
raiyanr on HN
Opinionated scope rather than Kafka compatibility
From 2 comments
Fwiw the only two times I've used kafka in my career have been for traffic on the order of GBs/sec. And the folks I know who have relied on streaming pipes for genuinely realtime…
jdcasale on HNAlso (in case this isn't obvious) I'm 100% a fan of the decision to _not_ tightly couple to the kafka wire protocol. Kafka's apis are full of landmines and gotchas, and you can…
jdcasale on HN
Objections
Write latency is high (~250 ms ACK) due to object storage
From 2 comments
Can you help an old man understand? This sounds like a kafka-like streaming system, but backed onto s3-objects? Doesn't this mean that write performance is going to be bad?
KaiserPro on HNI'm glad you asked, and yes, PicoMQ does have some Kafka-like semantics. However, Kafka is great at being a huge pipe, so you'd create topics like tables. PicoMQ, on the other…
adesh_nalpet on HN
Requests
Disk/EBS-staged WAL for low-latency ACKs
From 1 comment
Precisely this! I might even add a section in the docs, “Not a replacement for Kafka,” under the FAQ. Where Kafka starts to fall short is routing. If you want to access the data…
adesh_nalpet on HN
Questions
How does cold start and WAL recovery affect scaling to zero?
From 1 comment
Awesome work on this, The "one binary" approach with an embedded admin dashboard makes the barrier to entry delightfully low. Since you mentioned nodes are stateless and you have…
Farrynet on HN
How does it compare to S2?
From 1 comment
Love the landing page design! I'm excited to give it a whirl this evening. Initially, I started to compare PicoMQ to https://github.com/s2-streamstore/s2. If you're familiar with…
gpsmsn on HN
Alternatives named
S2 / S2-Lite
From 2 comments
Love the landing page design! I'm excited to give it a whirl this evening. Initially, I started to compare PicoMQ to https://github.com/s2-streamstore/s2. If you're familiar with…
gpsmsn on HNonly if it could be run serverless. but nice product overall - just like s2 lite.
dzonga on HN
Ursula
From 1 comment
I’ve been obsessed with everything durable lately and this is good timing as electric just got acquired so the state of their durable streams project is unknown. Have you looked…
Jonovono on HN
AutoMQ and WarpStream
From 1 comment
Precisely this! I might even add a section in the docs, “Not a replacement for Kafka,” under the FAQ. Where Kafka starts to fall short is routing. If you want to access the data…
adesh_nalpet on HN
SlateDB
From 1 comment
I've been recently exploring the object store based data stores such as turbopuffer, slateDB. have tons of questions revolving in my mind about latency and relaibility. I'll try…
srinivaskarre on HN