Think this should be highlighted in the article, because that's actually pretty cool but the article gave me impression that it's a simple sugar over child_process only.
Is this done in zig in the core bun runtime or is it implemented as part of the standard bun lib? How much perf is there? Small commands like cd or ls I'm less interested in. You say you provide your own shell... bsh, zigsh, what?
The parser, lexer, interpreter, process execution and builtin commands are all implemented in Zig.
There’s a JS wrapper that extends Promise but JS doesn’t do much else.
The performance of the interpreter probably isn’t as good as bash, but the builtin commands should be competitive with GNU coreutils. We have spent a lot of time optimizing our node:fs implementation and this code is implemented similarly. We expect most scripts to be simple one-liners since you can use JS for anything more complicated.
Good to hear you guys made the right decisions. Bun is awesome and the more performance you guys can squeeze with zig, the better. Keep it up! Bang up job already.
Do you worry that people will use this in their actual programs, rather than just in development scripts? You've at least quoted variables, which is several steps better than most Bash scripts, but even so Bash tends to be hacky and fragile. The original JavaScript code using native APIs is more verbose but better code.
Hmm you have a point but I don't think it's a problem since this is for the cli instead of the browser. Plus $ is pretty common in the shell to indicate the prompt.
(if you're coming from old school client side javascript I can see the momentary confusion (and in fact I had to blink myself), but in a shell script $ making you think of a shell prompt nonetheless seems like a pretty reasonable default to me)
This is super cool, but can you fix bun -i so that it actually auto installs missing libs? That would really help with having self-contained scripts. Then I can finally start replacing my shell scripts with bun.
Nope. Zig is still changing. In my understanding bun is generally quick to adapt to these changes, and one of the projects zig is keeping an eye on when breaking changes are introduced.
I've played around with Zig a few times and quickly ran into compiler bugs, things that should work but are not yet implemented, lots and lots of things completely absent in the stdlib (and good luck finding custom zig libraries for most things)... given all that, I just can't fathom how they managed to write Bun mostly in Zig (I see in their repo they do use many C libs too - so it's not just Zig, but still it's a lot of Zig)... and I wonder how horrible it must've been to go from 0.10 to 0.11 with the numerous breaking changes (even my toy project was a lot of work to migrate).