Show HN: Pure Python web framework using free-threaded Python

2 hours ago (github.com)

Barq is an experimental HTTP framework built entirely in pure Python, designed for free-threaded Python 3.13 (PEP 703). No async/await, no C extensions - just threads with true parallelism. The question I wanted to answer: now that Python has a no-GIL mode, can a simple threaded server beat async frameworks?

Results against FastAPI (100 concurrent clients):

- JSON: 8,400 req/s vs 4,500 req/s (+87%)

- CPU-bound: 1,425 req/s vs 266 req/s (+435%)

The CPU-bound result is the interesting one. Async can't parallelize CPU work - it's fundamentally single-threaded. With free-threaded Python, adding more threads actually scales:

- 4 threads: 608 req/s

- 8 threads: 1,172 req/s (1.9x)

- 16 threads: 1,297 req/s (2.1x)

The framework is ~500 lines across 5 files. Key implementation choices:

- ThreadPoolExecutor for workers

- HTTP/1.1 keep-alive connections

- Radix tree router for O(1) matching

- Pydantic for validation

- Optional orjson for faster serialization

This is experimental and not production-ready, but it's an interesting datapoint for what's possible when Python drops the GIL.