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Why TriFrost exists?

Wednesday, May 7, 2025|peterver

✨ The Frustration That Sparked It

TriFrost started with a simple question: why are most backend frameworks either too rigid, too leaky, or locked to a single runtime?

After years of building systems with Koa, Express — and later Hono — I kept running into the same walls: brittle types, inflexible internals, and performance trade-offs I didn’t ask for.

🔧 Building What I Actually Wanted

In early 2024, I started prototyping a better approach — a framework I called Falcon. The idea was simple: build a tool I actually wanted to use. Something that could scale up or down, work across runtimes, and get out of the way when needed.

It had to be:

  • Type-safe from end to end — with types that don't collapse under composition.
  • High-performance — no rewrites, just fast paths and tight control.
  • Ergonomic and composable — like Koa, but more modern and scalable.
  • Runtime-agnostic — run it on Node, Bun, uWS, or Workers with zero changes.

📦 Lessons from Infrastructure

This focus on portability wasn’t academic — it came from real work. Years ago, I migrated over 50 microservices from DigitalOcean to Azure in under a week. Kubernetes made it seamless. Same containers, different cloud, no headaches. That kind of abstraction — where portability feels natural — stuck with me.

I wanted that same principle in backend code: write once, run anywhere.

🧊 Why TriFrost?

In April 2025, I open-sourced the framework under a new name: TriFrost — a nod to its three core principles: Type Safety, Runtime Portability, and Performance.

This isn’t a rewrite of the past. It’s a distillation — built slowly, intentionally, and with care.

🚀 What’s Next?

TriFrost is still evolving. But the foundation is solid, and the goal remains simple: make fast, typed, portable APIs effortless to build.

Built with TriFrost, for TriFrost.