[HN Gopher] I built a faster Notion in Rust
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I built a faster Notion in Rust
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 155 points
Date : 2025-11-19 21:15 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (imedadel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (imedadel.com)
| johnisgood wrote:
| Irrelevant, but "a faster", not "an faster".
| ls-a wrote:
| It's actually an faster if they used rust
| lagniappe wrote:
| 'an' precedes a vowel sound, 'a' precedes a consonant sound.
| not-so-darkstar wrote:
| it's a joke
| lagniappe wrote:
| what's the punchline? I like jokes
| nicoburns wrote:
| Looks like the original title was "an actually faster" and HN
| stripped out the "actually"
| lagniappe wrote:
| Automated or not, editing titles is not cool. What an odd
| double standard.
| hresvelgr wrote:
| Looks promising. Where I think Notion really succeeds is letting
| people easily make attractive live documents. Where they've
| meandered off imho is trying to shoehorn in an RDBMS. If you can
| enable people to make pretty pages, and keep your document format
| simple, you'll be off to a very good start.
| airstrike wrote:
| Really cool stuff. I will spend some time here digging into the
| details.
|
| I've built a Cursor for business users in Rust. Spreadsheets,
| slideshows, and an agentic loop.
|
| If you're up for it, it would be nice to chat and share stories
| and vision.
|
| Email is andy at inboard dot ai
| aswegs8 wrote:
| Whats your pricing? Will early access be free?
| Sekhmet wrote:
| > Each seat will cost around EUR/$10. If you see yourself using
| this product, consider sponsoring Outcrop today for EUR/$100;
| you'll get EUR/$200 as credits on launch.
|
| From the linked blog.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| This is great, I wish tech giants focused more on latency.
|
| Gmail, Notion, Facebook, are painfully slow on my high-end laptop
| with gigabit ethernet. Something is wrong in our modern
| engineering culture.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| I think the problem is a lack of "engineering culture".
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Obviously not with Gmail/Facebook, in that case it's just
| 100% incentive misalignment.
|
| The others, probably, VCs are incentivized to fund the people
| who allocate the most resources towards growth and marketing,
| as long as the app isn't actively on fire investors will
| actively push you away from allocating resources to make your
| tech good.
| umanwizard wrote:
| You would be surprised at how bad the "engineering culture"
| is at meta. There are surely people who care about page
| load latency but they are a tiny minority.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| I mean, if you look at Meta's main product it's hard to
| imagine anyone there cares about engineering. It might be
| the single worst widely used tech product in existence,
| and considering they produce the frameworks it's built on
| it's even more embarrassing.
| umanwizard wrote:
| There are a few people who care A LOT about engineering,
| otherwise everything would completely collapse and not
| work at all. But they are far from the majority.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| People experience latency but if you "saw like a corporation"
| you could only see throughput and never latency.
| stu2421 wrote:
| Mono Avalonia Not i on 1 No te
| wkjagt wrote:
| I recently started looking for a new(er) laptop, because it
| often felt slow. But I started looking at when it was slow, and
| it was mostly when using things like GMail. I guess my feeling
| was "if my laptop isn't even fast enough for email, it's time
| to upgrade". But doing things I actually care about (coding,
| compiling) it's actually totally fine, so I'm going to hold on
| to it a bit longer.
| Sanygeek wrote:
| This is the exact feeling I had. My 2019 intel MacBook Pro
| has 12 cores, 32gb ram and a 1TB hard drive. Yet, most
| consumer web apps like Gmail, Outlook and Teams are
| excruciatingly slow.
|
| What is surprising is that a few years ago, these apps
| weren't so terrible on this exact hardware.
|
| I'm convinced that there's an enormous amount of bloat right
| at the application framework level.
|
| I finally caved and bought a new M series Mac and the apps
| are much snappier. But this is simply because the hardware is
| wicked fast and not because the software got any better.
|
| I really wish consumer apps cared less about user retention
| and focused more on user empowerment.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| All it would take is forcing an artificial CPU slowdown to
| something like a 5 year old CPU when testing/dogfooding
| apps for developers to start caring about performance more.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Of course. Anything that has greedy and/or non-technical
| management will be slow.
| beswalod wrote:
| Another Notion-like app. But it's already many FOSS alternatives
| crashabr wrote:
| What are they? The thing I value the most is the collaboration
| and the relational part, allowing to build pages that are
| essentially views on other data.
|
| The only one I'm looking forward currently is the next version
| of Logseq which will enable collaboration on their existing
| block-based authoring model.
| theknarf wrote:
| Have you seen https://anytype.io/?
| moneywoes wrote:
| not FOSS
| jxmesth wrote:
| https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan.
|
| Here's an alternative.
| Sytten wrote:
| The prosemirror port would make for a nice OSS library if OP is
| willing to put it on crates.io.
| drcongo wrote:
| Loved the thought processes in this post, so definitely
| interested. Notion always feels half-baked.
| woile wrote:
| prosemirror in rust? I'd like to see something like that!
| sgarland wrote:
| It certainly looks like the author has given careful thought to
| making this performant, but I am skeptical about it at scale.
| While OT means there should be fewer updates than CRDT, you still
| wind up with a fair amount of them, and you have to periodically
| rebuild the base document from accumulated steps, which can be
| quite large.
|
| Assuming your backing store is Postgres, I'd experiment a lot
| with the various column storage strategies, at various sizes of
| documents and varying amounts of writes. The TOAST overhead can
| become a huge bottleneck.
| xanth wrote:
| This looks like it has great potential, but what I really want is
| an open source "notion" with a well considered plugin & schema
| model. I desperately want to sync back all my data into a single
| cohesive graph; notes, reading list, messages, exercise activity
| in a more compute friendly format than MD files.
| bakli wrote:
| Like Obsidian?
| shmoogy wrote:
| Obsidian isn't open source
| echelon wrote:
| I'm still happy to use it. It's not like they can rug pull
| on the data or even the existing app binaries.
|
| I'd really like to see the team get rewarded for their
| work, too. I'd be sad if it went 100% open and they didn't
| so much as draw a market salary from it.
|
| I think if it went open, they'd get nothing. That's the one
| thing I strongly dislike about open source is that only
| hyperscalers really economically benefit from it.
|
| They've done a remarkable service for all of us.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| I used to be very against closed source products but
| changed my mind recently. One of the founders of Obsidian
| makes some great points here:
| https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-
| obsidian/1515/1...
| echelon wrote:
| This is a great rebuttal.
|
| 99.9% of the internet is closed source and we don't ask
| for it to be opened. From our ISPs, to Google, to the
| hyperscalers.
|
| If anything, I think we should be asking _those things_
| to be open. If we 're only asking the little guys, the
| big guys with trillion dollar market caps skate by. This
| is exactly how they want it. Fewer gradients for small
| players to grow.
| hexo wrote:
| I do ask for that and generally refuse to use closed
| source sw. But... something being opensource doesnt
| always mean you can change stuff. Like signal-desktop
| that has build process so badly convoluted that even
| gentoo doesnt build it itself. (has it improved already?)
| echelon wrote:
| Two things:
|
| 1) Modern 2010s era "OSI Approved open source" is a meme
| built by hyperscalers to get free work, poach the efforts
| of others (Amazon makes hundreds of millions on Redis,
| Elasticsearch, etc.) and eliminate the threat of smaller
| players.
|
| There are great things like Linux and Blender and ffmpeg.
| But there is also a concerted battle waged by trillion
| dollar companies against us using "open" to salt the
| field of any kind of economic growth salient.
|
| By being completely open and not keeping some leverage,
| you ensure you cannot make the same revenues the big
| companies can. And they will outspend and outgrow you.
| They will encircle and even find a way to grow off of
| your labor while you don't see so much as a dime.
|
| 2) You wouldn't be on the internet right now if you
| really refused to use closed source. The binary blobs in
| your hardware, your ISP, your wifi. Not even Stallman can
| do it.
|
| I love open source. But I hate how difficult it is to
| make money. And I hate how the big players have used it
| to enrich and entrench themselves by making it just the
| crust of their closed source empires.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > The cost to benefit ratio is very low for our small
| team of 2, and our plate is already full.
|
| Wow, I didn't know the team was so small - go them!
| wsve wrote:
| It was that small in 2020, it's more in the 5-10 range
| these days
| j1elo wrote:
| > _From what I see of the pricing options in your
| business model, having your code released under a FOSS
| licence would make no difference to how you make money._
|
| Except that making their client FOSS would help a lot to
| replicate the APIs and create a FOSS server, which would
| definitely make a difference on how they make money.
| braza wrote:
| > It's not like they can rug pull on the data or even the
| existing app binaries.
|
| This.
|
| I spend 6 months to export 100K notes from Evernote
| mostly because they intentionally throttle the exports to
| a limit and you can extract it only in their proprietary
| format that truncates some data.
| Kye wrote:
| I was surprised at how similar Trilium looks to Obsidian when
| it was suggested in a thread somewhere:
| https://triliumnotes.org/
|
| It's open source and as far as I can tell uses a database.
| gman83 wrote:
| AppFlowy ?
| blubber wrote:
| Isn't really (ie fully) open source, is it?
| kgarten wrote:
| Logseq? (Though it uses md)
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| It's definitely a work in progress, but AnyType has a lot of
| functionality similar to Notion. I haven't used it in a while,
| so I don't know whether there are plugins in any meaningful
| capacity.
|
| From past experience, it's even pretty simple to host your own
| sync server to get away from their account/storage limits.
| notachatbot123 wrote:
| AnyType is not open-source.
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| Fair enough, it's protocol is open source and the apps are
| source available. Modifications can be made by individuals
| for their own uses, though. I think it's as close as you
| can expect to get with a mostly full-fledged Notion
| competitor.
|
| In any case, I don't particularly enjoy AnyType, despite
| coming back to it a few times to test it out (and still
| maintaining my own sync server, despite not actively using
| it, in case I go back to try it out again after some
| demonstrably updates). Just pointing out that it's a less
| restrictive alternative.
| albertdessaint wrote:
| You might be interested in Graphiti:
| https://github.com/getzep/graphiti. With a self-hosted Graphiti
| MCP, you can connect ChatGPT or Claude to build a knowledge
| graph from all your data. You can then query and update the
| graph directly through conversation & by ingesting data and
| visualize the graph using tools like the Neo4j Explorer.Don't
| know if that could fit your use case but that could be a fun
| way!
| wim wrote:
| We're building a new multiplayer IDE but for docs/tasks [1].
| Local-first, real-time collaborative and end-to-end-encrypted
| sync. Not open source but self-hostable with a single binary
| and hackable with plugins (custom properties, views, code,
| etc).
|
| [1] https://thymer.com
| abstractbeliefs wrote:
| No open source, then I'm not playing.
|
| I use Zim wiki for everything just now and I don't like it.
| I'm in the market for a replacement, and would even pay like
| with how Immich does it.
|
| Unless the source code is available or you put it into legal
| escrow for when you go bust/abandon the software+, I will not
| invest my time and data into a system where I am entirely
| dependent on another organisation or service.
|
| + And you will go bust or abandon the software before I die!
| niklashog wrote:
| If you need total control they offer selfhosting.
| ObengObeng wrote:
| I will definitely be checking this out when it comes out!
| Hopefully soon!
| ednico wrote:
| Seems amazing - I cannot wait to test Thymer out!
| fourseventy wrote:
| You should look at https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium. It's
| what I use every day for the things that you mentioned.
| Fervicus wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Are you using it on mobile? How is the
| experience?
| square_usual wrote:
| There's a ton of these right now. I did some research the other
| day and found at least five "open source" (to various degrees,
| all of these are not strictly speaking open source but open
| core) notion alternatives, and they're all in some ways better,
| in some ways worse than notion. I settled on AFFiNE [0] because
| it felt the snappiest, but they've got a lot of telemetry and
| tracking so I forked to remove that and use my telemetry-
| removed frontend as a PWA.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE
| pscanf wrote:
| Adding my own to the list:
| https://github.com/superegodev/superego (Warning: still an
| alpha.)
|
| Distinctive points:
|
| - It exposes the "database metaphor": your data is organized in
| collections of documents, each collection having a well-defined
| schema.
|
| - It's all local in an app (no server component to self-host).
|
| - It has an AI assistant on top that you can use to explore /
| create / update.
|
| - It allows you to create small personal apps (e.g., a custom
| dashboard).
|
| - It allows you to sync data from external sources (Strava,
| Google Calendar, Google Contacts.)
|
| Cons:
|
| - The database metaphor is quite "technical". A "normal" user
| is not comfortable with the idea of creating their own
| collections, defining a schema, etc. In fact, right now I only
| have developers and techies as a target audience.
|
| - It's not optimized for any one use case. So, for example, as
| a notes-keeper Notion is obviously much better.
|
| - It's still in early stages (I'm working on it alone), so:
| - There's no mobile app yet. - It doesn't yet
| support syncing between devices. - There are just 3
| connectors to sync from external sources.
| elbear wrote:
| Tiddlywiki
| scoring-wade-6c wrote:
| You can try https://getoutline.com
| Jaxan wrote:
| I specifically like md, because I will always be able to open
| it and modify, even if the original app no longer exists. I use
| obsidian without any extensions.
|
| I must admit that I don't archive things like exercise
| activity. So maybe the simple mindset won't work then.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| I see a big amount of naiveness on his post, I tried to view it
| with a positive mindset, but I can't help myself and think how
| naive his perspective on that is.
|
| First, lots of server-side code is IO-bound, writing it in Rust
| vs. Java/C# would barely show any difference in a Monitoring
| tool, in a real-life scenario.
|
| His authorization system is very limited in scope, of course it
| can be fast! Get real users and we will see if that will still be
| fast.
|
| When you are running it in production, even if using Zanzibar's
| approach of loading everything into memory, you'd still need to
| handle many aspects he didn't think of, like updates to such
| permissions, and dealing with sharding etc. Things are always
| more complex in real life.
|
| And last not but the least, Notion is really fast as it is. I
| never knew it was slow.
|
| Without bringing any new concept to "Notion", I find it hard to
| believe this will ever work.
|
| I hope he finds happiness building it though, building is fun!
| wjsdj2009 wrote:
| Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.
| braza wrote:
| Last year after a thread around Obsidian and the downhill of
| Evernote I took almost 6 months to migrate more than 100K
| clippings and notes and it's so refreshing to have your own data
| in sync in your terms and not be in any proprietary format, that
| I do not image myself going to anywhere that I cannot
| push/retrieve my notes in my own terms in a portable format.
|
| Notion is a great product for corporations, and I get why
| companies are jumping on this bandwagon so fast; however, as a
| consumer, I wouldn't consider it or any option based on seat
| (like Outcrop) or any that wouldn't give me a binary that I can
| use in whatever machine that I want.
| 0dayman wrote:
| Obsidian is much better
| bomewish wrote:
| This looks like a tidy little out of the box fts system. I'd use
| it as a tantivy interface basically. And I'd pay for it if it had
| good and simple document ingestion and metadata search semantics.
| Not the intended use case really but this doesn't exist.
| ancharm wrote:
| Will this also be available on the web via WASM compilation, in
| addition as a desktop app?
| mellosouls wrote:
| Unless its open source I can't really see the point with bragging
| about it being in Rust. Its just another product, and its either
| faster or its not - the underlying language or platform is pretty
| irrelevant.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Is this the new "I built a Twitter clone in a weekend"?
| CalvinClare wrote:
| While it's possible to develop a more convenient version of
| Notion, I think it's only suitable for practice, since we can't
| compete with companies that monopolize the AI note-taking
| industry.
| tonyoconnell wrote:
| You can make your website run fast as well with
| https://astro.build - it strips the Javascript and uses HTML
| until js is needed. You can get 300ms page loads for outcrop.app
| with Astro on Cloudflare Pages. Good luck with the project. I
| requested early access - You should use the response to the form
| submit requesting access better - I mean somebody who added their
| email expressed a lot of intent - why end the conversation with a
| toast notification? I hope life is going well in Dublin.
| denysvitali wrote:
| > Something went wrong! Cannot read properties of null (reading
| 'enable')
|
| (On outcrop.app)
| nixpulvis wrote:
| > It's not decentralised, it's persisted to Postgres, but loaded
| in memory on startup.
|
| How are changes to permissions managed I wonder.
| hexo wrote:
| Nice. I dunno what is Notion but I suppose - I tried Obsidian and
| some other sw i dont recall anymore, never liked it. Then I found
| org-mode in emacs and gave it a try. I did not look back except
| for one feature - mind maps or 2D note taking. For this I've
| tried mind maps but it just wasnt really what i needed or wanted.
| I probably dont really know what I want or mean by 2d note
| taking, I just have some vague idea.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The thing which I've always wanted to see is a knowledgebase
| system which uses a company's e-mail as an interface:
|
| - new e-mail from client comes in which can't be matched to an
| existing project? New page in the knowledgebase
|
| - second e-mail from client comes in w/ an attachment? It's
| stripped off and added to that page in the kb
|
| - employee sends out e-mail with link to the initial version of
| the project? The link is added to that page
|
| &c.
|
| Maybe AI could make something like that work now?
| smodo wrote:
| Still baffles me that Outlook won't let me tie together emails,
| calendar items and documents. It makes so much sense to combine
| these things. All my meetings are about documents and their
| related correspondence but you never have a coherent
| information space for them.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| I can highly recommend Obsidian for long-term knowledge bases.
| Have been writing about using it well:
| https://bryanhogan.com/tags/obsidian
|
| It's missing collaboration at the core, although it's possible to
| achieve this currnetly with third party solutions, or the next
| major update should also include it as it's the "multiplayer"
| update.
| bad_username wrote:
| Obsidian is nothing less than a complete IDE for text.
| dtkav wrote:
| I work on one of the third party plugins enabling real-time
| collaboration in Obsidian called Relay [0].
|
| We have a novel architecture where you can optionally register
| a self-hosted relay server with our control plane for complete
| privacy for all of your docs and attachments.
|
| We know that people typically prefer to have a unified vault,
| so you can share individual folders with different groups of
| people within your vault.
|
| Relay is free for markdown docs up to 3 users, and then we have
| a hobby plan which includes attachment storage (especially
| popular with D&D and TTRPG players), as well as per-seat plans
| for businesses and universities. There are a couple of cloud-
| only alternatives like peerdraft and screen garden as well.
|
| [0] https://relay.md
| perfmode wrote:
| Curious about the authors authz implementation.
|
| Preloading authorization data into memory does not, by itself,
| provide the specific security guarantee (consistency) that
| defines Zanzibar.
|
| The Zanzibar model is famous not just because it is fast, but
| because it solves the "New Enemy" problem (or causal
| consistency). Simple in-memory caching (preloading) often fails
| this test unless it is paired with complex invalidation logic
| that mimics Zanzibar's Zookies.
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