Firenook: A faster drop-in for the Firebase emulators
Firenook is a new Apache-2.0 Firebase emulator suite with a Rust engine and no Java dependency. Its authors report substantially faster writes and lower memory use than the official suite on their workload; those are project benchmarks, not independent general results.
Version 0.2.0 emulates Firestore, Auth, Storage, Functions, Pub/Sub and more, supports persisted local data and provides an MCP interface. It does not emulate Realtime Database or Hosting, and the Firebase CLI is still needed for deployment.
On HN, developers welcomed the alternative; one suggested a separate Rust Realtime Database project, and others questioned the performance trade-offs and choice of Firebase.