Honker adds durable queues, pub/sub, streams, and a cron scheduler as a SQLite loadable extension, with no broker or second datastore required.
Key Takeaways
Enqueue jobs atomically with business writes in the same transaction; rollback drops both the order row and the job.
Cross-process wake latency is ~0.7 ms p50; detection uses PRAGMA data_version polled every 1 ms (~3 µs read), not a kernel file watcher.
One background thread fans wake signals to all subscribers, so listener count scales without added query cost.
Bindings for Python, Node, Rust, Go, Ruby, Bun, and Elixir all share one on-disk .db format via a plain SQLite loadable extension.
Supports Huey-style task decorators with retries and timeouts; targets projects already using SQLite as primary datastore (Bluesky PDS, Turso, LiteFS).
Hacker News Comment Review
Skepticism about the polling approach: one commenter challenged the claim that busy-polling data_version every millisecond is preferable to a kernel file watcher, calling the framing oversold.
Honker’s SQLite-queue niche is narrowing: Oban, cited in the source as Postgres-only gold standard, now supports SQLite, and Litestack pursued a similar Rails path before being abandoned when Rails added native SQLite support.
Notable Comments
@arlobish: Oban now supports SQLite, contradicting honker’s own docs that position it as Postgres-only competition.
