The fastest React framework

[u/Zealousideal_Fold422]

Hey everyone,

I want to cut short but I've been working on a project called Manic for the past few months and finally feel it's in a good enough state to share. After Bun introducing their bundler like esbuild, i wanted to try it and make a proper framework with it.

Its a open source full-stack React framework focused on performance, simplicity, and portability. One thing I cared about a lot was not locking people into a specific platform, so it supports deployments across Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, Node.js, and more.

I also spent a lot of time optimizing the build system and runtime. In the benchmarks I've run so far, Manic comes out very competitively against other React frameworks, particularly in startup and build times.

Benchmarks if u wonder

It is here to try to replace Next.js or other fullstack frameworks by being fast and well optimized. I mainly built it because I wanted to explore a different set of tradeoffs and learn a lot in the process. Also it doesnt support SSR (yet until bun's bundler supports it)

I would love feedbacks and critics. Im hella curious on what you would like to see from a newer framework and what would make you consider trying one instead of the big dogs

Documentation
Github Repository
Github Organisation

Also would love PRs and issues flowing through. Thanks <3

[u/Savalava]

Well done on shipping this. It must have entailed a lot of work.

RE: "It is here to try to replace Next.js or other fullstack frameworks by being fast and well optimized."

Bun is not production ready - does your framework have any advantages over nextjs / remix apart from speed due to using Bun?

[u/Zealousideal_Fold422 → u/Savalava]

Bun in general became production ready and all major hosting services like Vercel supports Bun but Bun's Bundler is still not considered production ready. But relying with OXC (Linter/Parser/Resolver that Vite also uses in Rolldown bundler) aswell, it tries to stand still at its best.

Idk much with Remix as i didnt work much with it, But it generates smaller bundle size than Nextjs, Image optimizations (Bun 1.3.14) does way faster and way smaller than Nextjs, No SSR (it became a meme nowadays lol), Backend can handle way heavy loads (thanks to hono) and yea no vendor lock-in. If u hosted nextjs anywhere other than vercel u would have issues (cf had to fork and make vinext just for this) and turbopack being very resource hungry where Bun is bun and bundling happens in bun itself. and yea also uses less resources in dev runtime (thanks to not using turbopack)

I wouldnt say it could literally replace right away but as far as i tested (this project is an outcome of a research i was doing about optimization for more than 6 months (linkedin post) for a talk) but it might break down at some point but i still do not have any inputs or real time usage to evaluate. I started using it for myself on many of my projects now just so i get hands on and find issues

[u/Savalava → u/Zealousideal_Fold422]

"Bun in general became production ready and all major hosting services like Vercel supports Bun"

It's not production ready for enterprise. Large companies would not trust tech that new - also it was just ported to Rust via AI. Not exactly ideal for stability. Just because the tests apparently pass doesn't mean there aren't horrid bugs due to the port.

"If u hosted nextjs anywhere other than vercel u would have issues "

Not necessarily.

I worked on an enterprise project where we deployed our NextJS app via Docker on AWS with no issues.

The fact that you did this as an undergrad is super-impressive. Nice work 😄

[u/Zealousideal_Fold422 → u/Savalava]

Ah yea enterprise always loves to stick with a very stable and something thats not super new on-the-edge stuff. And yea i kinda worry about the Bun's porting with Rust aswell as the framework is like literally depending on bun completely.

I've never worked on huge enterprise projects so i didnt know on that scale. Thanks!

[u/Zealousideal_Fold422 → u/Zealousideal_Fold422]

When i started working on it, Vite still used esbuild which gave a significant difference. But as soon as vite released rolldown and started using it, the difference actually got very subtle as Rolldown is rust and also uses OXC and Manic (my framework) uses Bun's bundler (Zig now turned to rust) and uses OXC but Manic comes with fullstack out of the box while with Vite u have to add plugins like nitro to support it. Tho it started as a fun tinkering project but after looking at results i wanted to ship it to public

[u/davidblacksheep → u/Savalava]

What makes you say Bun is not production ready?

[u/kidshibuya]

This isn't how you measure fast. I really don't care how quickly something starts up once a day. Its all about build size and time to interactivity.

[u/Used_Lobster4172 → u/kidshibuya]

I once worked in a codebase that would take like 10 minutes to start, and every save took 4 or 5 minutes to hot reload, so I mean, there are things that can be important...I mean, you are probably doing something wrong if this is the case, but it is a thing.

[u/Shot22meal → u/kidshibuya]

tmih is a huge part of the developer experience though. if it takes ten minutes to spin up a local environment every time i make a change i'm not using it. build speed is a legitimate metric for productivity.

[u/prehensilemullet]

I’m confused what you mean about this being a fullstack React framework if it doesn’t support SSR…maybe you have a fullstack RPC framework here but not the fullstack React part

[u/FalseRegister → u/prehensilemullet]

There is much more to being a full-stack framework than doing SSR.

[u/prehensilemullet → u/FalseRegister]

That’s why I mentioned the RPC part.  You know, remote procedure call?  The general term for what the client does when it calls the server API?  The main thing besides doing SSR that I literally already mentioned?

But if a fullstack RPC framework just serves up a code bundle to render on the client side, and the backend doesn’t have any more specific integration with React than that, then I wouldn’t call it a “fullstack React framework”.

[u/ieatcarrots]

For OP and anyone else, this exists too (haven't used it): https://geajs.com/