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hotwired
turbo
JavaScript2020–2025
hotwired / turbo

turbo

The speed of a single-page web application without having to write any JavaScript

Web Development
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
23Distinct people
27Mentions
3Explicit recommenders
7.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The speed of a single-page web application without having to write any JavaScript

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

There are two sides to the argument which I think should be treated separately: a) Is it a good idea overall? and b) is htmx implementation good enough? a) I think so, yes.…

can3p used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year27 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-12-22 20:20:17 UTC to 2025-11-18 16:13:55 UTC.

0510152020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 4 submissions, 9 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1349
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808

What Hacker News says

27 sources
dymk·Nov 18, 2025
Ignoring DHH's politics (which are enough to make me look for alternatives), he makes breaking technical decisions to tooling with little to no community involvement. E.g., https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/971 He makes it difficult to trust that, were he in charge of Ruby, he wouldn't just take the reigns and stubbornly do whatever he thinks is technically right for "aesthetics" at the cost of all else.
In Ruby 4.0.0 Preview2
cassiogo·Oct 10, 2025
I like Hotwire but I admit its a bit confusing to get started with and the docs dont help. Form submits + redirects are a bit weird, you cant really make the server "break out" of a frame during a redirect if the form was submitted from inside a frame (there are workarounds, see https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/issues/257). Also, custom actions [https://turbo.hotwired.dev/handbook/streams#custom-actions] are super powerfull, we use it to emmit browser events, update dom classes and attributes and so on, just be careful not to overuse it.
In I switched from Htmx to Datastar
can3p·Apr 8, 2025Recommendation phrase
There are two sides to the argument which I think should be treated separately: a) Is it a good idea overall? and b) is htmx implementation good enough? a) I think so, yes. I've seen much more spa that have a completely broken page navigation. This approach does not fit all use cases, but if you remember that the whole idea of htmx is that you rely on webserver giving you page updates as opposed to having a thick js app rendering it all the way it makes sense. And yes, js libraries should be wrapped to function properly in many cases, but you would do the same with no react-native components in any react app for example b) I don't think so. htmx boost functionality is an afterthought and it will always be like this. Compare it with turbo [1] where this is a core feature and the approach is to use turbo together with stimulus.js which give
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s you automagical component life cycle management. Turbo still has it's pains (my favorite gh issue [2]), but otherwise it works fine [1]: https://turbo.hotwired.dev/ [2]: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/issues/37
In Less Htmx Is More
seanwilson·Jan 4, 2025
> In Clojure, a dynamically typed language, referencing a var that is not declared, or calling a function with the wrong number of arguments will result in a compilation error. You don't need static typing or type annotations for this. Can it catch problems like e.g. if you try to access a `y` field on some input object but only field `x` is defined? And if you want to define a function that takes a callback that must accept two arguments? What about ways to force you to check a variable with type `string | undefined` is defined before you do something with it? At some point it must breakdown because more complex checks can't be inferred? > it's about "wasting time." ... annotating everything with types and maintaining them is not. See this example. I'd argue the type annotations are minimal, but you gain a lot of safety, documentation an
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d refactoring help from them: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/971/files
In Types are a basic tool of software design (2018)
benatkin·Jan 4, 2025
Because this is an internal function in a _library_, and you should be willing to look inside it if you're changing a call to it. Here's where whether or not it's defined can be traced to: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/blob/41c074ff113a8882aadbc... Maybe the types should have been written differently, to indicate that it's the type of the submitter property in a FormEvent. That's another cost of using TypeScript, is trying to get the types right. TMTOWTDI.
In Types are a basic tool of software design (2018)
benatkin·Jan 3, 2025
People tried to argue that in the PR, suggesting to change variable names. This one: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/971/files#r1317386731 > function buildFormData(formElement: HTMLFormElement, submitter?: HTMLElement): FormData { > It might be useful to know that submitter is optional argument here. > How would one express that? The variable now needs to be renamed? And two lines later: > const name = submitter?.getAttribute("name") It's already easy to see that submitter is optional.
In Types are a basic tool of software design (2018)
seanwilson·Jan 3, 2025Recommendation phrase
I love this before/after example of TypeScript being removed from a library as a clear illustration that only occasional simple type annotations are needed: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/971/files Looks like so much useful documentation for understanding the code, assistance for refactoring, and static checking (which are like always running, fast and exhaustive unit tests for free) for a modest amount of type annotations that each person on the team would need to recreate in their heads anyway. Static type checking is so useful for catching runtime errors to do with optional values and index/key not found error too, that always create a load of edge cases. Editing JavaScript with no types is scary, especially when you didn't write it. You're mostly guessing what the types must be and hoping your running code exercises enough e
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dge cases to catch any problems. "You should write more tests" as an alternative rings hollow for me because (for the things they will check for you) types are more concise, exhaustively check all values, are ran continuously, are fast, aid with automatic refactoring, document the code in the same file its in, and will locate exact snippets that are causing errors. More often than not, test mostly check happy paths, aren't even close to as exhaustive, and nobody is writing tests that check every combination of function parameters being null vs non-null, string vs number etc. (which would be a huge amount of noise in your test suite that would slow down refactoring too). Types are a compliment to tests as well, not an alternative. I can't relate to arguments about types getting in the way (as long as you avoid trying to get too clever like with complex generics and TypeScript conditional types). Usually when this happens, it's because it's hard to reason the runtime edge cases in your own head and there's probably a simpler way to write it. I'd love a good non-niche example to the contrary. Worst case in TypeScript, you can use `any` as an escape hatch anyway so as long as you can add types to most of your program it's not a strong reason against for me.
In Types are a basic tool of software design (2018)
btown·Sep 21, 2023
Ah, this is part of the Turbo project that had the whole controversy earlier this month around DHH unilaterally removing TypeScript, citing only his own experience, despite overwhelming community disapproval: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/971 It's a really cool pattern to have server-side rendering drive a specification that's used by web and native components alike. Airbnb uses this pattern to great effect: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/a-deep-dive-into-airbn... - and ironically, they speak to the importance of strong typing of the data model as a way to control complexity. I really hoped that Turbo would be a way to make this pattern more mainstream. But, much like Unity, 37signals seems intent on taking actions that hurt its developer community, and it's hard to justify moving towards a solution with such antagonistic
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governance.
In Strada – Create fully native controls, driven by your web app
yellow_lead·Sep 7, 2023Recommendation phrase
I highly recommend reading the PR discussion for this. https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/971 Some summary: * forced through without any discussion * many maintainers raising questions, but no answers * random changes attached to the PR (formatters, etc) Wherever you land on types, I think we can agree that this is not an ideal way to make a change to a larger open source project. This has all the hallmarks of an executive decision made on a whim, and forced through at the last minute. Lead maintainers certainly have the right to make big changes on a whim, but giving people some notice before breaking other projects and having good communication is true leadership.
In Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript

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