[wild_egg]

For those of us forced to be in the JS ecosystem, finally having a runtime that Just Works has been great.

Bun has replaced a massive number of tools and dependencies from our stack and really counteracted the tooling explosion that we were forced into with node.

[diggan]

> really counteracted the tooling explosion that we were forced into with node

Isn't this more-or-less a self-inflected wound? Who forced you into working with node?

[Defletter]

In our case, it's not so much being forced to use Bun, but rather that Bun is in real terms infinitely more convenient than lower-level languages. Firstly, even the most novice of novices tend to have a passing familiarity with JS/TS, whereas this is not true for C/Zig/Rust/etc, so it's easier for people to contribute to our projects. Bun also provides so many things for free, statically, and cross platform. You want a TCP server? A websocket server? SQLite database? You want to include static assets? You want to generate static assets at compile time? Etc? Bun provides it.

Attempting to replicate even a modicum of this in lower-level languages can be a real struggle. Rust is definitively the least-worst in this respect because there's been a concerted effort by the community to provide stable packages that do most things. But Rust is a complicated and unapproachable language. Using other low-level languages like C/Zig, and you immediately run into issues of libraries and static linking. And even if you find a library, its documentation is either lacklustre or outright missing (looking at you libuv and libxev respectively).

The amount of manual setup and third-party builds-system finagling just to: 1) run a TCP server; 2) fetch data over HTTP; 3) do both of these using a single event loop (no separate threads); 4) use SQLite for storage; and 5) have all this produce a single self-contained executable. Yet I cannot understate how trivial this is with Bun.

[edoceo]

$JOB

[throw-the-towel]

Could you please elaborate on this? What tools besides Node itself did you replace with Bun?

[zackify]

Imagine complaining that a language has so many users and projects so it sucks.

Exactly, bun is killer. The test runner is extremely fast.

I can build apps with 1-5 total dependencies and everything just works, and works incredibly fast.