April 23, 2026
Honk if you hate polling
Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite
SQLite gets real-time alerts — fans cheer, purists side-eye the “honk”
TLDR: Honker adds real-time alerts and a built‑in job queue to SQLite so apps can skip extra servers and keep everything in one place. Commenters split between loving the atomic “all in one file” simplicity and warning about polling, platform quirks, and claims that plain system pipes might be faster.
SQLite just got loud. Honker, a new add‑on, gives the tiny, everywhere database SQLite real‑time alerts and a built‑in job queue — think push notifications and a to‑do list — without adding a separate server like Redis. The maker brags about single‑digit millisecond delivery by watching SQLite’s write‑ahead log (WAL), and jokes they’re bringing a “sixer” to the “just use SQLite” party. It’s early and experimental, but the crowd showed up with takes.
The hype crew loves that jobs and data live in the same file: one atomic commit means your order and its “send email” task succeed or fail together. No more “message sent, transaction failed” horror stories. Meanwhile, the skeptics rolled in: “Why not just use the operating system’s file watchers like inotify?” Cue the platform drama — a macOS veteran warns that some system notifications get dropped in the same process, so Honker leans on boring-but-reliable file checks. Others probed a spicy edge case: when the WAL file shrinks during a checkpoint, could signals be missed?
And then there’s the speed vs. simplicity showdown. Pragmatists asked, “Why not just use plain pipes between apps and keep SQLite for storage?” Fans shot back that keeping everything in one place is the point — simpler backups, fewer moving parts, and fewer ways to lose messages. The memes wrote themselves: “honk if you hate polling,” with Team One‑DB vs. Team Add‑More‑Stuff revving in the comments.
Key Points
- •Honker is a SQLite extension that implements Postgres-style NOTIFY/LISTEN, providing durable pub/sub, task queues, and event streams without a broker or polling.
- •It uses SQLite’s WAL file to trigger push-style, cross-process notifications with single-digit millisecond delivery.
- •Honker ships as a Rust crate and loadable SQLite extension with bindings for Python, Node.js, Bun, Ruby, Go, Elixir, and C++.
- •Queues and events live in the same SQLite file, enabling atomic commits with business data and rollbacks that revert both.
- •Features include retries, priorities, delayed jobs, dead-letter handling, periodic tasks with leader election, result storage, durable streams, and named locks/rate limiting; the project is experimental.