Programming

For anyone wondering wtf Bun is, it's a project championing JavaScript. It wants to replace node.js.

On a tangent, I recently switched from a cinnamon desktop (which uses TypeScript or some form of js) to KDE-plasma because I noticed that cinnamon occasionally couldn't keep up with rapid mouse movements (and my machine is high end). KDE-plasma handles it fine and even has a "find my mouse" feature that turns doing the "draw fast circles to see if the mouse drifts all over the screen because the handler can't keep up with the updates" into a game of "how big can I make the cursor".

I wish the whole "let's keep javascript as a thing" movement would just die out. Other languages aren't hard to learn, why are so many people obsessed with sticking with js and shoehorning fixes for its massive flaws instead of just letting it die?

Evil spreads its tendrils further yet.

Oh goddamn it. I just started doing projects in Bun and moving some of my older projects to it.

Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck.

Looks like it's MIT-licensed, so it's probably time to make a non-Anthropic fork.

Uhoh, now the anaconda is going to want some.

Serious question for anyone who actually uses Bun:

Why are you using Bun instead of Deno or Node?

If you would have asked me 10 years ago, what were the biggest problems with JS as a whole, I would have stated:

1. Poor type safety

2. No standard library which leads people into dependency hell

3. Poor security (installing a project should not even allow the possibility of key stealing or ransomware)

4. No runtime ergonomic immutable data structures with fast equality checks (looked like it was going to be resolved with the Records and Tuples proposal, but it was withdrawn and discussions are continuing in the composites proposal)

Today I consider point 1 mostly resolved and point 4 a problem for TC39 and engine implementers, and not resolvable by runtimes themselves.

That leaves us with problems 2 and 3.

I see Node having poor solutions for 2 and 3.

I see Bun having poor solutions for 2 and 3.

I see Deno having great solutions for 2 and 3.

As far as I can tell, people have chosen Bun for either hype or speed reasons.

Hype doesn't seem like an important reason to choose Bun since it's always fleeting and there's enough investment in the industry to keep each runtime going for a long time.

I do see speed being a moderate issue with JS, but that's mainly due to:

• dependency install times which should be a one time cost, and which can be reduced anyway by using a standard library

• slow framework slop, which isn't really a runtime issue.

So I'm not sure speed fits as a reason for choosing Bun.

I'm not sure what the other reasons are, but I'm genuinely curious.

If you're using Bun in projects today, why have you chosen bun?

I started using Claude Code myself. I got kind of obsessed with it.

Over the last several months, the GitHub username with the most merged PRs in Bun's repo is now a Claude Code bot. We have it set up in our internal Discord and we mostly use it to help fix bugs. It opens PRs with tests that fail in the earlier system-installed version of Bun before the fix and pass in the fixed debug build of Bun. It responds to review comments. It does the whole thing.

Seems like they've bought into the hype.

Not overly surprising.

Google and Salesforce have been "developing" new features and products this way for at least the last 13 years?

1. Find promising small business/startup
2. Buy it with your war chest money
3. Force them to integrate with your systems and live inside your walled garden.

:(

Time to switch to yarn or something.

How misanthropic

Welp. Guess I'm switching to Deno.

Man, Bun's great, I've been using it since 1.0.0 essentially so that REALLY sucks

Like some of the other people commentating on this thread, I'll look into using something else, but it's really sad and frustrating that I need to switch things over and over again

yeah as a dev myself I saw this coming a few months back and stopped using Bun so this doesn't surprise me. They got on the cursor hype train awhile back and that was enough for me.

What's bun? Some other comments mention a js runtime so is it like a V8 competitor?

It's not a bad outcome. Bun is cool but has $0 revenue and some hand-wavy thing about future paid cloud services. This way, larger companies will give them a more serious shot than they would a small startup.

It still doesn't have a revenue story, but it's now strapped onto the side of one of the few AI companies with a decent chance of surviving the next AI Winter. And if Anthropic goes sideways, the Bun engineers can fork the code and keep going.

People who are surprised by VC funded software going to shit...

Funniest thing I I've seen in ages.

Seriously, this always happens. At some point the investors want a huge payout and they will get it by exploiting existing users or they just shutdown the whole company and strip it for parts.

That sucks. I was really liking bun.