Lightspeed, build real time apps the Laravel way (+asteroids demo)
Details
- External ID
- 49781032
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- Sept. 20, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 17
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7129186602870813
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 24, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 24, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
Description
Hi HN!Laravel has worked with websockets for years but generally speaking it's a one way push architecture (i.e. http in, sockets out).Lightspeed is kind of like node in that it's a single server that serves your http and your websockets all under one roof. Auth runs in 0.03ms (a Redis read, no database). Your Laravel handler runs inside the full container and the reply comes back down the same socket. I think this could be really cool for creating new ways of working with Laravel.Anyway, I put together a live demo to show it in action. Basically a cross between slither.io and Asteroids.Game here:https://innerloop.works/lightspeedRepo here:https://github.com/innerloop-dev/lightspeedNote: This is 0.1.0, the API may change before 1.0. It needs the Swoole extension and Redis. MIT.
Enrichment
- Theme
- payments, billing, and wallet infrastructure
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- real-time application framework for laravel
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Writing a unified, high-performance C/Rust/Go or PHP-extension single-server runtime that simultaneously handles HTTP and persistent WebSocket state with sub-millisecond Redis auth requires advanced systems networking and event-loop engineering.
What it would actually take: Built using custom event loops (e.g., epoll/io_uring via C, Rust, or Go, or deep FrankenPHP/Swoole modifications) integrating persistent PHP runtimes with raw TCP/WebSocket protocol handling. The hard part is multi-threaded memory safety between long-lived WebSocket connections, non-blocking zero-copy I/O, and maintaining native Laravel lifecycle compatibility without memory leaks.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Laravel Livewire, Laravel Reverb, Pusher
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 20 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 21 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 306 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Vask · hn · 2026-05-05 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Inertia Start · ph · 2026-09-22 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Open Terminal · hn · 2026-08-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Sendcoins · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- pg3d-websocket-client · github · 2026-09-09 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Ustps (UDP Speedy Transmission Protocol Secure) and USSH · hn · 2026-06-08 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Socket to Me, a static file server that runs in the browser · hn · 2026-06-22 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.34
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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