Volt
Fast, Git-native API client written in Zig (Postman alternative)
Details
- External ID
- 47323484
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Volt
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 10, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1070110701107011
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hey HN,I wanted to build something real in Zig, and I was annoyed that Postman needed an account and an internet connection just to send a GET request. So I figured I'd make something I would actually use.It kind of snowballed from there. 50,000+ lines later, it does requests, test assertions, collections, environments, CI/CD reports, import/export, and has a browser-based Web UI (`volt ui`). All in a single binary with zero external dependencies.Some numbers: - Binary size: ~4 MB (Postman: ~500 MB) - Startup: 42ms (Postman: 3-8 seconds) - RAM idle: ~5 MB (Postman: 300-800 MB) - Dependencies: 0 - Account required: No It uses plain-text .volt files that live in your git repo. Your API tests are just files, versioned with your code.For CI, you copy one binary and run `volt test`. No npm, no Docker, no runtime.Why Zig? Honestly, I wanted an excuse to write a lot of Zig. But the explicit allocators, comptime, and cross-compilation from one machine made it practical to ship Linux/macOS/Windows from a single codebase with no external packages.There's a CLI, a TUI with tabs and search, and a Web UI. It's not perfect but I use it daily and it hasn't crashed on me yet.Site: https://api-volt.com Repo: https://github.com/volt-api/volt Benchmarks: https://github.com/volt-api/volt/blob/main/BENCHMARKS.mdHappy to answer questions about the Zig implementation, that's the part I'm most excited to talk about honestly.
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- git-native api client written in zig
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Volt is a massive (50k+ lines) native systems-level desktop application written in Zig with an embedded GUI, custom HTTP/TLS engine, and Git integration.
What it would actually take: Volt requires writing low-level Zig code interfacing directly with platform graphics/UI (or an immediate-mode GUI framework like raylib/cimgui/DVUI), native networking (libcurl or custom Zig HTTP client with TLS), and libgit2 bindings for Git-native storage. The hard parts include memory management in Zig without a garbage collector, cross-platform UI rendering, request pipelining, and testing suites for complex HTTP/REST workflows.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 81 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #74 of 82 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 125 days after the earliest competitor.
- CI/CD in your terminal, zero YAML · hn · 2026-03-25 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I built a fast RSS reader in Zig · hn · 2025-12-16 · 90 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Zig parser in ~70 lines of JavaScript · hn · 2026-01-17 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Voiden · hn · 2026-02-01 · 48 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Ant · hn · 2026-05-09 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- A Unix environment in a single HTML file (420 KB) · hn · 2026-02-18 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- ZCCInfo · hn · 2026-01-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Git rewind · hn · 2025-12-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
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