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by fritolaid 1342 days ago
The thing about Bun that turns me off is around the OS-specific system call optimizations (using different optimizations for different platforms) which means that each new feature they add to bun that uses any system calls must be done 3 times for the 3 major platforms (MacOS, Windows, Linux)

Another thing is I believe Deno supports WebGPU and Node supports WebGL via Angle etc (for e.g. running Tensorflow with GPU support)but Bun not only has no story there but its author has refused to provide any info about their intent aroundGPU support.

3 comments

The thing about Bun that turns me off is around the OS-specific system call optimizations (using different optimizations for different platforms) which means that each new feature they add to bun that uses any system calls must be done 3 times for the 3 major platforms (MacOS, Windows, Linux)

You mean just like libuv/node, the JVM and Go?

I have nothing to do with anything in this space, but why would you not want to take advantage of the platform’s native capabilities?
it might drive some skepticism toward long term support or reliability ( everything has to be developed three times ) and unknown performance characteristics ( or even potential behavior ) across platforms.

not sure I agree with the take, but that's how I read it

to be clear, this isn't my take.
It's surprisingly easy to develop OS-specific code using Zig (the language Bun uses), because of its excellent integrated support for cross compilation and comptime feature. For example, with some zig code I write (a posix layer for node), I build for many platforms in parallel every time I make a change.