As of the previous week, Bun has become the dominant force in the JavaScript ecosystem. So far, I had a good experience with Bun.
What was your experience with Bun so far? Any downsides or problems you've encountered?
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Top comments (14)
The incompatibility with the Node ecosystem means it's just another "Competing Standard" (as in this the xkcd comic xkcd.com/927/). I'd rather wait for Node.js to evolve or use Go instead.
I'm skeptical for now.
It's OK to toy around using a side project that you know it'll be thrown in the bin after a week or two.
Working on corporate, high-budget projects it doesn't seem like an option to evaluate, at least not yet.
On the other hand, synthetic benchmarks need to be picked with a grain -or a full truck- of salt.
It's possible that in real use cases bun performs worse than Node depending on the scenario and I won't be surprised by that.
It may help on changing the roadmap for Node, whether this is good or bad it's a different topic of discussion.
Out of interest, which decisions do you think are questionable?
This discussion is being driven on this post I'm not yet pronounced on it to criticise anything, as I'm waiting to digest all the information with external sources and try a couple of things on my own.
From the corporate PoV there's zero reason to jump into new trains as always has been and as always will be. On a toy project you're risking your own time, at that level you're setting at risk monies in terms of millions so... I'm not in a hurry to know all the details and my daily job certainly has challenges waiting to be solved.
At that point, and just to grasp some stuff to answer the question here, APIs that do the same than Node's but on a different way will force you to stick with Bun due to large costs of swapping back to Node (or Deno or whatever).
Built-in JSX and TS is a nonsense, we all know since the moment they got a piece of the cake that at some point in the future they will disappear (ES will eventually add anything valuable from TS in the core API, and JSX is simply one of hundreds that catch up just because it's the one used in React).
Don't get me wrong, React is my go-to choice most of the time (usually through Next JS), but I believe these meta-languages should live in it's context, outside of the RE themselves (and there are quite a few reasons for that).
At this point, with my knowledge of Bun, it's screaming TECH DEBT out loud. Saddest thing is that this looks like a try to make everyone -using the mainstream- happy while appealing to tribal people, which is a great effort dedicated here instead on other stuff.
I just want to point out that this is a really solid and practical comment in re: to any new technology. I think there’s a little bit of a hype problem in the dev world that doesn’t match up with the corporate reality most of us in tech roles face. Change is difficult, expensive and risky.
That said, progress is great. Challenging the status quo is great, keeping up on trends is great and necessary. But I’ve seen so many new things come and go, and I know how many devs out there are trying to bring in readers or capture an audience these days, I have to take all the “BUN IS THE NEW NODE” articles with a big grain of salt.
Even if it is here to stay, it will take a long time for the corporate world to follow suit (but that shouldn’t discourage anyone from trying it out and I’m certainly enjoying the posts and discussion around it).
Absolutely!
Cannot install on windows
You can if you have WSL installed on your system.
I haven't tried out Bun for anything non-trivial yet, but I'm interested to see what it brings to the table as an enthusiastic user of Deno. I think the new diversity in high-quality JS server runtimes is a good thing for the ecosystem as a whole — Deno and Node are already learning and improving from each other.
However... my first experience with Bun was failing to launch the repl due to a bug in "v1.0.0", which wasn't a great start 😅
The lack of documentation currently available online for Bun is a significant challenge
If everything they said during the 1.0 launch panel is true, then I'm super hyped for it. However, I think we're not ready for production in larger enterprise systems yet. For my personal website hosted on Vercel, sure. But for a product that tailors to hundreds of thousands to millions of users, I think we're a bit too early.
Reason being, we haven't really seen case studies of this with Bun yet. Also, with Windows support lacking, there's a huge section of developers that won't use it. They could with WSL but that's a bridge to the solution, not a delivered package they can plug n play.
I'm working on a product that will launch soon and our team figured we should give it a shot. The plan was to switch over to bun if they supported all of our dependencies but unfortunately they don't so we are sticking with Yarn for now until they mature.
It's faster than Node in a lot of cases. Bun API's are amazing. But it still needs more adoption, it still have bugs and problems to be fixed, it still not have full compatibility with Node...
So I would not use it now unless for fun.
I think it's super promising, and the creator Jared Sumner is an inspiration for me.
My main concern is that it's written primarily in Zig which, while it seems to be a killer language, hasn't even reached 1.0 and isn't in a production-stable state... Counting on the small Zig community to not make breaking changes to the language that your entire runtime is built on just feels like a recipe for disaster.