Lightspeed, build real time apps the Laravel way (+asteroids demo)
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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.
HN · launched Sep 20, 2026 · 17 upvotes (top 29%) · 0 views
Niche: software development frameworks · 154 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -89% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
More like this: all 154 launches in software development frameworks →
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
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Attention rank: #19 of 57 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 312 days after the earliest competitor.
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