Show HN: BusterMQ, Thread-per-core NATS server in Zig with io_uring

[maxpert]

I did a similar thing few days back just not with NATS protocol (Made it pure websocket based), and with rust. Couple of questions:

- Where did you get the machine to test your server on?

- Why did you end up going with zig?

[simlevesque]

Anyone can buy a 9950x on Amazon or any tech store, it's consumer hardware.

[jbaptiste]

My personal rig and Zig because I worked with it for a little more than a year. It was a fun test to do.

[dorianniemiec]

I'm also building a network server with thread-per-core and io_uring, except it's a web server, it's written in Rust, and io_uring is provided by a fork of Monoio runtime (I forked it to make it work with Windows and FreeBSD).

[spicypixel]

You should at least try and align the ascii flowchart in the readme on the repo.

One day Claude will do it correctly but today is not that day.

[neomantra]

Unusual tones all around in the thread here. My initial observations before reading the comments here:

* "wow, OSS projects are starting to have some pretty wild landing pages, guess it's not just AI logos at the top of the README anymore"

* "wow, all in one commit. was it vibe-one-shotted, curated private work that was squashed, or something in between"

* "wow, Zig is kind easy to read although I really don't want to learn another language in 2026 although I already started learning some to use libghostty"

* "wow, is Zig really this much performant than Golang at the tails"

* "weird it uses Bazel, doesn't Zig have it's own build system like Golang"

* "so who is the author? I see they made an GitHub org for this. Are they going to keep doing stuff after the commit and should I keep this in my messaging queue neurons? Is this some company or person I should follow"

* "the README has a misalignment, do I PR that?"

* "oh cool, it lets you tune memory and the dispatcher"

---

I never thought of exactly how it manifested, except about the single commit. I have started "vibe coding" much more as the capabilities really improved in the last few months, so that isn't intrinsically a trash approach.

But the "who" and the "how" and the "why" do matter, in terms of whether one should look at it for education or infotainment or as a potential tool.

Disclosure of the intention and method would be courteous to the community when we create and share these things. Otherwise we'll all have high cognitive burden with the amount of projects we'll be seeing in 2026!

[jbaptiste]

That’s fair, I should have framed it more clearly upfront. Thanks for the feedback.

I was excited about the results. The intent was to talk about performance and architecture, not to imply this was a quick or effortless project. There’s been a lot of iteration and experimentation behind it, and I should have communicated that context better as well as the use of AI for the help.

[koakuma-chan]

Is it bad if I work in private and then squash?

[ngrilly]

Why use Basel instead of Zig build tools, as it’s all written in Zig anyway?

[ahoka]

That was in the prompt.

[jpgvm]

Upvote for Bazel. I think these days I place a lot more value on how well an ecosystem slots into Bazel/friends because monorepos are increasingly more useful and relevant.

So nice to see there are good rules for Zig and that folks are using them.

Also ironically I think starting with Bazel/Buck/whatever your poison of choice is almost always a good move even if people tell you it's overkill. The easiest time to do it as at the beginning, all times after that is too hard and the marginal cost of building with it from the start is minimal.

[carverauto]

agreed, love Bazel + BuildBuddy

[owyn]

Downvote for this web site is a horror movie billboard and zig already has a build system which is zig and that's one of it's neat features.

[snehesht]

Wow, the whole thing (website, github repo) is down.

[smarx007]

I am assuming the message durability guarantees lean towards YOLO rather than ACID? See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196105

[codys]

> I am assuming the message durability guarantees lean towards YOLO rather than ACID?

"Core" nats doesn't have durability. Nats jetstream is the api built on top of nats that in the main nats-server impl provides durability. Jepsen tested Nats Jetstream.

Also from your link:

> Regular NATS streams offer only best-effort delivery, but a subsystem, called JetStream, guarantees messages are delivered at least once.

The project linked here does not implement the nats jetstream api, just normal nats.

So yes, it seems its same (documented, understood) "yolo" as normal nats.

[samgranieri]

This looks fairly cool. If I had the production need for this, I’d definitely consider this.

I paired with Claude and simply added nats.c to the zig buildup system for my zig project at work. It works like a charm.

[BiteCode_dev]

Does it have a similar system to Jetstream? If yes, does it address the reliability issues Jetstream has been criticized about lately?

[jbaptiste]

Absolutely not and will never have.

[mindslight]

Putting aside the whole presenting slop-coded things as cromulent projects, is anyone else tired of this constant myopic focus on performance? I don't need a message queue that can "saturate the bandwidth of the next generation of hardware". Rather I want middleware that is easy to use - simple to set up (not hundreds of configuration knobs for optimizing performance), reliable (can run clustered on a few instances on its own, not using k666s or anything, and handle instances going away for a few weeks if one dies or I'm reconfiguring things), has good semantics that won't encourage Heisenbugs down the line (eg look at MQTT's actual semantics versus how it's incorrectly used by Home Assistant generic MQTT endpoints), and so on. I get that there's no surveillance industry money backing projects aimed at individual users, but it's still pretty sad that individuals creating projects in their spare time are still focusing on features desired by the surveillance industry.

[hhhhhggg]

jepsen on nats still gives me anxiety

[PaywallBuster]

Comparison/benchmark to other alternatives?

[littlestymaar]

And it's gone…

[jbaptiste]

Oh god no. Just having fun with zig and being a little over enthusiast I guess. I'm a big fan of nats, and really wanted to see how far you can push the idea if you do it differently. I was not expecting that tbh but, hpn too!

[steeve]

nobody cares about the website being done with AI because the code of the project itself is not AI

you need to touch grass