BookPress, a WordPress core in C/C++ (Live Demo)
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Since ~40% of all websites supposedly still run on WordPress (WP), I thought it might be useful to run it faster. BookPress is about 50% faster than a performance-tuned WP setup with Elementor and WooCommerce.Every time I used WordPress in the past, I got frustrated how slow it was, even with just a few plugins. So I wrote an light-weight C/C++ core and an embeddable PHP engine to run plugins and themes, with most of the WP API surface covered.Try the live demo, including wp-admin!The embeddable PHP runtime that covers most of Zend PHP's features runs 2x slower than Zend, but BookPress is still faster than a performance-tuned WP instance with OPCache, page cache and object caches.BookPress runs alongside a traditional WP installation on Linux arm64 and x86_64.Looking forward to what you all think.
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HN · launched Oct 15, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 73%)
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Similar launches
See all 90 similar launches →Could you build this?
No Reimplementing WordPress core natively in C/C++ and serving existing PHP sites with plugins requires near-complete compatibility with PHP semantics and the WordPress API surface. That is a massive, expert-level systems project beyond what vibe coding can deliver.
What it would actually take: A real version would need a compatible implementation of the WordPress core API, the hook and filter system, the database schema and query behavior, and either an embedded PHP runtime or a compatibility layer for plugins. It requires experienced compiler and runtime engineers, extensive compatibility testing against the plugin ecosystem, and years of effort to match WordPress's behavior.
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Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 90 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #85 of 91 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 340 days after the earliest competitor.
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- php2shell-wordpress-rce · github · 2026-10-23 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- WordPress.org · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
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