The bext Blog
Engineering deep-dives, release notes, and ecosystem news from the team building bext — the open engine for AI-native apps.
Five Frameworks, One App: an honest, uncached benchmark
We built the same app in Next.js, Remix, Astro, Qwik, and bext, then forced every one of them to render fresh on each request and measured it. bext renders fastest — and the fairness rule cost Next.js a 5× drop it had been hiding.
Kilobytes, Not Megabytes: Resumability and Real HMR in bext
bext islands now resume instead of hydrate — they ship ~0.6KB gzipped, run nothing on load, and survive an edit with their state intact. Here's how it works, what we measured, and what we deliberately left out.
Multi-Tenant by Default: Hosting Every Site in One Process
Running web apps one-process-per-app is exactly why running many of them is expensive. bext shares one render pool across every site on the box. Here's the model — and where it breaks down.
The Day One Render Took Down Every Site
On June 10, a single page render wedged a worker in our shared V8 pool — and within seconds, every site on the server stopped responding. A blameless post-mortem of how one render became everyone's outage, and the defense-in-depth that bounds it now.
Building Your First bext Plugin in 10 Minutes
bext plugins let you add custom middleware, transforms, and cache backends. Here's how to build one with QuickJS, WASM, or Python.
Migrating from Vercel to bext in 15 Minutes
A step-by-step guide to moving your Next.js app from Vercel to bext — with zero code changes, automatic TLS, and ISR that just works.
What Our Benchmarks Actually Mean
Everyone claims their framework is fast. Here's exactly how we measured bext against Next.js, why we report ratios instead of headline numbers, and where the gains actually come from.
Inside bext: How We Built a Single-Binary Web Runtime in Rust
A look at the architecture decisions behind bext — the shared V8 render pool, on-demand compilation, the ISR stampede guard, and the watchdog that keeps one bad render from taking down the server.
Introducing bext: The Rust-Powered Runtime That Replaces Your Deployment Stack
Today we're open-sourcing bext — a single Rust binary that replaces nginx, certbot, Cloudflare WAF, Redis, PM2, and Vercel.