Hello again my little Stardancers ✨

inkan 0.4.0 is out, and I closed the entire milestone in one day. Every single issue. I don’t know who I am anymore either.

The one I’m proudest of: npx @vxnsin/inkan learn. It’s a tutorial that lives in your terminal. It sets up a tiny tea shop, gives you twelve quests, and checks your work every time you hit save. Forgot a validation rule? It tells you. Stuck? Press h for a hint, press it again for a less subtle hint. By quest 12 you’ve built routes, contracts, auth, hooks, plugins, and you’ve broken a client on purpose (for science). No other web framework ships a tutorial inside itself, so I figured: why not be the first one.

inkan also got grown-up stuff this time. Hooks, plugins and decorators, so you can bolt on your own things without touching the core, and a little rate limiter built on exactly those APIs to prove it works. Routes can now live in a folder tree, routes/teas/[id].ts and friends. And inkan finally leaves the house: app.fetch runs it on Bun, Deno and serverless, workers: “auto” uses every CPU core you own, and there’s an adapter for uWebSockets.js if you want to go absolutely feral.

Then there’s inkan seal. It stamps your contracts into plain code ahead of time, so big requests get checked in about half the time. No eval, no runtime magic, just a file you can actually read. And if your contract changes and you forget to reseal, inkan notices and quietly ignores the stale seal. It’s basically a very responsible goldfish.

Speed check, because I promised honest numbers: on a fair benchmark inkan beats Hono, by 0.4 points. I’m choosing to celebrate that like it’s 40. Fastify is still a bit ahead, Express is still Express. But put inkan on the uWS adapter and it’s a third faster than plain Node itself. Who’s the framework now.

Also: inkan moved into its own home at github.com/inkanjs, and routes can now say who’s allowed in (security: “bearer”) and actually mean it.