Queue/Stream Extension for SQLite

honker is a SQLite extension written in Rust with bindings for multiple languages, adding Postgres-style NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics to SQLite.

In Python, queues and streams are handled like this.

• Create a job queue with queue('emails'), and workers pick up jobs with claim() and process them by calling ack().
• stream('user-events') calls publish(..., tx=tx) inside a transaction to behave like a Kafka-style durable stream.

The extension also provides 20+ custom SQL functions. Examples include notify('orders', '{"id":42}') and honker_stream_read_since('orders', 0, 1000).

Real-time behavior relies on WAL mode, with workers stat-ing the .db-wal file at 1ms intervals to detect changes without heavy SQL queries. The core is the transactional outbox pattern, which ensures that jobs are only enqueued when the transaction has been successfully committed.