Every Node.js project I've worked on starts with the same ritual:

npm install express cors helmet morgan body-parser bcryptjs jsonwebtoken mongoose npm install -D @types/express @types/cors @types/bcryptjs @types/jsonwebtoken

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Then 40 minutes of wiring. A cors() call here, a body-parser config there, a JWT middleware you copy-paste from your last project. By the time you write your first route, you've already written a hundred lines that have nothing to do with your actual problem.

I got tired of it. So I built mimi.js — a Node.js framework that ships with everything a real API actually needs, keeps the Express API you already know, and runs at near-Fastify speed.

Here's what the same setup looks like with mimi.js:

npm install mimi.js

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That's it.

The Benchmark Numbers

Before I walk through the features, let's talk performance — because "Express-compatible" historically meant slow.

I ran autocannon against Express…