# PrinceJS

18 Hacker News commenters recommended PrinceJS and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Praised as a tiny, clean, fast Bun web framework built by a 13-year-old, with an Express-like API. Critics say benchmarks and tests are lacking.

## Why people recommend it

- Impressive work for a young developer (7 comments): "It's certainly more advanced than anything I tried at that age." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45962328)) "I do want to applaud your efforts, especially at your age." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45958077)) "good job, you are build something, and it's amazing!!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45959338))
- Clean, easy-to-read code (2 comments): "pretty cool clean and simple code for the framework" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45958180)) "Code is easy to read and understand." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45958030))

## What people warn about

- No tests yet (2 comments): "there's no tests but I suspect there would be a lot of bugs in the way routes are handled" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45959134)) "Looks great. However, there are no tests yet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45959960))
- Benchmarks unfair or misleading (2 comments): "The readme and stats remind me of VanillaJS, which should be a sign that you're not making a fair comparison here." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45962319)) "claims "PrinceJS fits in a tweet," but also that it's 2.8kB after gzip compression." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45957978))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Ruby on Rails](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ruby-on-rails.md): 337 recommend
- [Django](https://hackerapproved.com/p/django.md): 277 recommend
- [Next.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/next-js.md): 127 recommend
- [Phoenix Framework](https://hackerapproved.com/p/phoenix.md): 85 recommend
- [Laravel](https://hackerapproved.com/p/laravel.md): 71 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "PrinceJS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/princejs/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).