[veidr]

lol — what you're saying doesn't make sense to me, but I'm sure it makes sense to somebody

What I was specifically referring to is Deno (originally) trying to fix the (glaring, fundamental) problems that Node imposes on the world, vs just do them faster.

[coldtea]

Yes, but "fixing some fundamental Node problems" is a low bar, hardly the high mark of ambition now, was it?

And to offer a counter example, something like Dart appeared much more ambitious to me.

[brokencode]

I guess it depends on how you define ambition. If you are talking about in an absolute sense, yeah of course, the Dart project had to build a whole language, VM, and ecosystem. That's way more ambitious than Deno.

Though if you look relative to the team size and resources going into it, a project like Deno can still be considered ambitious. Creating an alternative ecosystem to nodejs is a large undertaking.

[veidr]

OK. But without changing programming laguages, "fix some fundamental Node problems" vs "don't fix those problems, just run them faster, and maybe inline the most popular dependencies"...

Surely we can agree that one of those positions is relatively less ambitious?

[pjmlp]

Well it remains to be proven how they can make a business out of fixing nodejs fundamental problems.

[veidr]

I think the Anthropic acquisition means that Bun isn't in that business anymore. Bun is still fixing fundamental Node problems, but that's no longer the business.

The business value the Bun team needed to deliver (to make the acquisition pay out) might very well be this controversial, but nevertheless spectacular, 6-day Zig→Rust port.

But beyond that, now Bun is just tooling used internally at Anthropic, which also happens to be open-source.

[pjmlp]

I also meant Deno as well.

[veidr]

Oh. Well, then, yes I agree. It certainly does remain to be proven if anybody can make "Node, but better" a business.

Certainly the recent layoffs¹ of ~half-or-so of the Deno team doesn't bode well for it, as AFAIK Bun was the only other significant player trying (to make it a business).

¹: https://www.reddit.com/r/Deno/comments/1rwjaeb/whats_going_o...