A couple of months ago we released Encore.ts — an Open Source backend framework for... Tagged with typescript, node, javascript, backenddevelopment.

Roberto Umbelino

Figma

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Encore.ts is an Open Source backend framework for TypeScript, boasting performance numbers 9x faster than Express.js and 3x faster than Bun with Zod. Its architecture leverages a multi-threaded event loop using Rust, and precomputes request schemas to optimize performance. With infrastructure integrations built in Rust, Encore.ts aims to off-load non-business logic from the JavaScript event loop, making backend applications highly optimized for speed and efficiency while maintaining compatibility with Node.js.

Encore.ts — 9x faster than Express.js & 3x faster than Bun + Zod

Boost #1: Putting an event loop in your event loop

Encore is literally a transparent proxy in front of your application. This is a powerful concept. You can compare it with AWS Load Balancer + AWS Lambda or any function runtime. After processing the request, Encore will make an optimized RPC call to your application. Blocking tasks like parsing the request, compression, or validation are done at the proxy level in parallel, which allows your application to do more in the single-threaded environment. A downside that isn’t mentioned here is that you have to opt in fully into the framework. You won’t be able to work with Node.js HTTP Request/Response objects or Web standards to leverage community plugins and frameworks. You have to wait until Encore provides all these as part of the core, or you have to develop your own modules from scratch.
The benchmarks are the best example of comparing apples and oranges. You shouldn’t compare HTTP frameworks while your solution offloads work on a proxy and communicating RPC. The real benefits of Encore are the benefits a transparent proxy/RPC protocol can enable, like automatic tracing, pre/post processing, client generation, and extending your platform with features without building them twice, like CRONs, WebHook, PubSub handling, etc.
In comparison, Fastify is performing quite well here. Run twice as many instances, and you can handle the same load without opting into a full-blown solution. In practice, you still have to deal with a single-threaded JavaScript process. The performance benefits of Encore can become negligible if you don’t take care of your application logic. For this purpose, Encore could provide built-in process spawning and load balancing.

Throw in a db connection and run bench marks again. Bet you a Starbucks breakfast it won’t make a difference then. Stop judging frameworks by whether they can perform faster hello worlds or not.

TLDR: a Typescript wrapper over a multi threaded Rust runtime