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by culi 871 days ago
Pick your horse to bet on. They both have great teams behind them. Bun (written in Zig) claims higher performance. It looks promising but independent tests have yet to validate these claims.

They also kinda have different goals. Bun seeks to be more of a drop-in replacement from Node whereas Deno, being spearheaded by the same person who made Node, seeks to move the industry forward and fix mistakes Deno made. However Deno, out of necessity, has also highly valued backwards compatibility with the Node ecosystem
3 comments
nonethewiser 871 days ago
It's a weird scenario. You have node which is entrenched, feature-rich, and stable although not perfect. Then you have two runtimes/ecosystems trying to optimize on that but in slightly different ways. I love it but I feel like there is barely room for even one. It's just incredible there is so much work being put forth into moving the needle maybe an extra 20% on the existing node/npm status quo.
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andsoitis 871 days ago
> Deno, being spearheaded by the same person who made Node, seeks to move the industry forward and fix mistakes Deno (I assume you mean Node.js) made.

If they aren't able to evolve Node.js to overcome the mistakes (e.g. because they're technical in nature, or momentum of install base, or they don't have the leadership ability), I am worried that they might repeat the same pattern with Deno, since it isn't possible to NOT make any mistakes.

OTOH, having a clean slate that's learned from mistakes and you can bring a lot of your code along doesn't seem like a major impediment.

Is code written for any of the 3 runtimes generally transferrable? I realize some won't (e.g. Deno has WebGPU support, which is attractive to me), but generally?

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Leokuma 871 days ago
The main difference is that Deno was thought to evolve hand in hand with browsers since the beginning. Node followed its own way and fragmented the JS ecosystem. It got to a point where it was basically impossible to realign Node's direction without breaking everyone's codebase. Mistakes will be made in Deno, but the direction of the project now takes into account the ecosystem as a whole.
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niam 871 days ago
> fix mistakes Deno made

You probably meant "node" here.

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culi 870 days ago
yup! too late to edit
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