--- title: Show HN: Firenook – Firebase emulators in Rust: 40×... description: Firenook is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase emulators that runs with your existing firebase.json, SDKs and ports. It claims 40 times faster writes and... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-firenook-firebase-emulators-in-rust-40-faster-writes-10-less-ram-gjzmhjxxu twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Show HN: Firenook – Firebase emulators in Rust: 40× faster writes, 10× less RAM | daily.dev og:description: Firenook is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase emulators that runs with your existing firebase.json, SDKs and ports. It claims 40 times faster writes and... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-firenook-firebase-emulators-in-rust-40-faster-writes-10-less-ram-gjzmhjxxu og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/GJZmHJxXU.png og:image:alt: Show HN: Firenook – Firebase emulators in Rust: 40× faster writes, 10× less RAM og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Show HN: Firenook – Firebase emulators in Rust: 40× faster writes, 10× less RAM **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 1 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Firenook is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase emulators that runs with your existing firebase.json, SDKs and ports. It claims 40 times faster writes and 10 times less memory use. It requires no Java and persists data across restarts. The Firestore emulator supports native and web SDKs, realtime listeners, Security Rules, named databases, and the official import and export. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Is there a faster alternative to the official Firebase emulators for local development? Firenook is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase emulators that works with your existing firebase.json, SDKs, and ports. It claims 40 times faster writes and 10 times less memory usage than the standard emulators, requires no Java installation, and persists data across restarts. _Developers tuning local Firebase workflows compare emulator options like this on daily.dev._ ### Does the Firestore emulator support realtime listeners and Security Rules? Yes, a Firestore emulator alternative supports native and web SDKs, realtime listeners, Security Rules, named databases, and the official import and export functionality, running on the standard port 8080. _Teams evaluating Firestore tooling track feature parity details like these on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 27 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-11-06). **TL;DR:** Reception is largely warm, with developers praising the performance work and calling out how neglected Firebase's local emulator experience has been, while a few push back by questioning the broader rationale for sticking with Firebase or relying on a single-maintainer project. **Sentiment:** 70% positive · 25% mixed · 5% skeptical **The case for** - Addresses a long-standing pain point: out-of-memory issues and Java bloat in the official Firebase emulator suite. - Firebase itself still offers real value (generous free tier, easy auth/SSO, natural scaling path to GCP) which makes better local tooling worthwhile. - Seen as filling a gap Google has neglected for many years despite having the cloud database expertise to fix it. **The pushback** - Some question why not simply use more powerful dev machines instead of rebuilding the emulator. - Skepticism about whether Firebase is even the right platform to invest in versus alternatives like Supabase. - Noted that the project is maintained by a single contributor, raising sustainability questions. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Mostly enthusiastic congratulations and feature requests, with a handful of pointed but good-faith questions about motivation and long-term viability. **Hottest debate:** Whether the real problem is Google's neglect of local Firebase tooling or whether developers should be moving away from Firebase entirely. **Open questions** - Will the project eventually support self-hosting or production use beyond local emulation? - Will Realtime Database support be integrated, potentially building on existing open-source Rust implementations? - Can the emulator support broader GCP/Firebase integrations some teams rely on? **Highlights** > Hi there, don't feel bad asking these questions. In fact, i had this questions in mind too while this project was started. Firstly, we already running of powerful dev boxes but still hitting out of memory issues in the official local emulators. These stronger machines doesn't remove Java or replaces the old console UI or able to loads tons of data. Google should fix it and it's expected, but for some reason, they haven't really prioritized local tools for local devs. In other ways of saying, some one had to take this in hand and try it out, and well we did :) > — [sanjevirau on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50387866) > Sharing my perspective as a big time user of Firebase: 1. It is practically free for a lot of my projects. Yes, there are also other free platforms out there now, but because Firebase is largely an abstraction on GCP, I have more reach if I need to scale it or move it into a more capable backend that I have full control over (very natural progression from Firebase -> Cloud Run -> GKE Autopilot -> GKE) 2. Firebase auth is still really, really good. It is super easy to get SSO working with Firebase auth. It's end of the day, it is largely (entirely?) just an abstraction on top of Google OAuth API, but it is by far the easiest and most foolproof of the solutions on Azure, AWS. And again, for most use cases, it is entirely free. 3. A well-designed Firestore backend is for all intents and purposes free for side projects and can still scale without the need to overthink it. I have run several side projects, blogs, etc. for years purely on Firebase because Firestore's free tier is really, really generous. Ridiculously generous. 4. It is easy to operate. If you want to run directly on a hyperscaler cloud (AWS, Google, Azure), Firebase is the best tooling. Azure doesn't really have an equivalent. AWS killed off their Copilot CLI[0] which I felt like was approaching the utility of Firebase and not a fan of Amplify (which seems to have changed direction recently). [0] https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/ : literally their best infrastructure tooling and they killed it.................... > — [CharlieDigital on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50392834) > This post also begs the question: Why didnt you simply provision more powerful developer boxes to handle the needs of the Firebase emulator? If runtime performance is the moat then won’t Google simply improve on these regressions using their decades of cloud database expertise with projects like Google Spanner? —- These are hardball questions and I feel a bit bad asking them, but I believe asking hard questions is kinder than blind adulation and support. > — [tmpz22 on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50387505) > Firestore's subcollection feature is pretty cool. As far as NoSQL dbs go, it's flexible query and indexing make it more suitable to app development than, say, DynamoDB. To me, the lack of good developer tooling has been what holds it back. Not having a maintained type-safe querying ORM/ODM library like eg. Prisma or Mongoose is a major flaw imo (not to mention missing out on the coolest firestorm) > — [nfw2 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50388909) > > if you guys are such skilled developers Why the plural? It's only one person: https://github.com/firenook-dev/firenook/graphs/contributors... > — [progval on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391441) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50378643) · 156 points · 27 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Testing Firestore security rules without touching production](https://daily.dev/posts/testing-firestore-security-rules-without-touching-production-hniqyzuq6) · All Things Open · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#testing](https://daily.dev/tags/testing), [#firebase](https://daily.dev/tags/firebase), [#firestore](https://daily.dev/tags/firestore) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-firenook-firebase-emulators-in-rust-40-faster-writes-10-less-ram-gjzmhjxxu) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Show HN: Firenook – Firebase emulators in Rust: 40× faster writes, 10× less RAM","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-firenook-firebase-emulators-in-rust-40-faster-writes-10-less-ram-gjzmhjxxu","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-firenook-firebase-emulators-in-rust-40-faster-writes-10-less-ram-gjzmhjxxu"},"datePublished":"2026-11-06T07:00:10.461Z","dateModified":"2026-11-06T16:40:13.913Z","description":"Firenook is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase emulators that runs with your existing firebase.json, SDKs and ports. 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