Bun 1.3 is here
Posted by mahdi_lky@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 234 comments
Bun v1.3 adds builtin Redis & MySQL clients, Node.js compatibility improvements and an incredibly fast frontend dev server.
Posted by mahdi_lky@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 234 comments
Bun v1.3 adds builtin Redis & MySQL clients, Node.js compatibility improvements and an incredibly fast frontend dev server.
magnomagna@reddit
Will definitely get somehow monitised in the future
TonTinTon@reddit
How though?
Ok-Kaleidoscope5627@reddit
Enterprise support agreements and fully managed hosting most likely. It's a pretty common model for open source projects. It's very profitable and pretty fair.
y-c-c@reddit
Fully managed hosting could be easily cloned by a service like AWS, especially when Bun is licensed under the MIT license. It's "pretty common for open source" in that it's pretty common for companies like Redis and MongoDB to play the open source game just to rug pull and relicense later to a more proprietary license when they had the market share and needed to compete against other people offering competing hosting services. I don't think this would be a sustainable business model at all.
60hzcherryMXram@reddit
I still don't understand the animosity towards the SSPL. I think everyone would agree that by the nature of open source, developers who make open source programs contribute far more for what they are compensated for than anyone else. That's why the vast majority of us work for corpos making proprietary code, and not publishing open source code.
To close that gap, large programs added a "You cannot literally just host the API of the system I worked on as a SaaS without paying a license," which technically makes it only source-available, not open source, but anybody who uses the program in their enterprise can still self host for free. All that changes is that Amazon can't add it as an AWS service and make more money off of the project than the project itself has ever made after like two hours of effort.
I'm personally not that sympathetic to Amazon as a company, so this seems... fine?
But of course, this is all an aside from Bun, which has not at all mentioned converting to SSPL.
y-c-c@reddit
The big issue is with the bait-and-switch that companies like MongoDB engages in. They started with a commonly used and popular license to lure in users and contributors, and then switched to a different license. A lot of open source contributors only contribute to projects that are truly open source, which AGPL was. To pull the rug and basically claiming all the work done by them and swapping the license to be something else is always going to garner badwill. Sure, they had contributors sign a CLA so it's legal, but goodwill and legality are two separate things.
That's kind of irrelevant? MongoDB is a for-profit company and they aren't volunteers contributing their software for the greater good. They are basing their strategy on the software, and open source is a useful way to gain legitimacy and popularity compared to proprietary code. No one forced them to do this, nor are they "contributing" considering this is their core product. Would you feel bad for a company losing money on their advertising campaign?
Again, most people (including me) don't consider SSPL to be "open source" anyway, so MongoDB is no longer an open source company.
Again, if MongoDB made their software SSPL since day 1 it's a very different conversation than what seems to be a trend of using popular open source licenses to attract users/contributors and then pull the rug under them.
My point was that providing hosting-as-a-service on top of your open source software doesn't seem to be a winning business strategy, with MongoDB being an example. That's in response to the above comment saying that Bun can make a business out of doing this.
60hzcherryMXram@reddit
Yeah, I'm still not convinced. The people who made those contributions still have those contributions under the old license, as the prior versions still stand under the old license, though you seem to imply it doesn't. They just want assurance that a company who gives them code to use for free will perpetually continue to do that, and consider it a "rugpull" when they are told that after a certain date they won't. If a restaurant raises its prices, I don't call that a "rugpull", so this mindset of perpetual entitlement strikes me as odd.
I also find it incredibly odd that you assert that something that betters the public cannot be a "contribution" if it was created for business purposes, when the second part of the sentence "for what they are compensated for" clearly shows that I am not using this odd definition of the word. I don't think you would agree that a doctor contributes nothing to this world, just because the whole medicine thing is their business strategy.
Finally, I do not know why you argue I am not allowed to have sympathies towards a specific group or company deserving money more than a different group, just to later argue that SSPL licenses make it harder for "users" (read: IT and programming departments at random corporations) to get their money's worth, as if I should now care.
y-c-c@reddit
The point here is that the new version of MongoDB, which still contains all these contributors' code, is licensed under SSPL. So MongoDB is still profiting off from the contribution from said folks, who made the contributions under the assumption that it's under GPL. It's not like the new version of MongoDB suddenly rewrote all these contributed code themselves. As I mentioned, an open source project is usually not allowed to freely relicense their source code since the contributors' code are owned by the respective contributors. They only get to do that since they force a CLA to be signed.
For example, while I haven't contributed to MongoDB myself, I do contribute to GPL repositories, since I know what the terms are and they are truly open source. I will not contribute to an SSPL licensed project or proprietary one for free. So if I actually contributed to MongoDB and they relicensed my code, I would be pretty annoyed about that.
It's more akin to a company who lured you in to a tractor promising that you can get it repaired with any repair shops, then in an update removed that ability and now legally you have to go to the official dealers to get support. Sure, you can go get another tractor (and some people do), but you have already been training on it and gotten used to its controls etc.
I didn't tell you how you should feel. You were saying how you don't understand the animosity towards SSPL, aka you have trouble understanding how others feel, and then when I tried to explain it you shifted to talking about yourself in your next comment.
Bottom-line is, if you think it's ok for a company to lure users in with an truly open platform, then once they built the user base, trap them in with a chance of license so they now are locked in to the platform, sure. Other people aren't going to though. This is a free world, and it's easier to break trust than to build it.
As I mentioned, the animosity would not exist if MongoDB made it SSPL day 1.
60hzcherryMXram@reddit
It's more like if a company lured you in with a free tractor, stating you can get it repaired at any repair shop, but then creating another free tractor that you can't do that with. Because the old tractor still exists, and can still be repaired anywhere, but people want the new thing.
MongoDB didn't force anyone to sign the CLA. The people who signed it chose to sign it. And I find there to be an absurd amount of irony in people caring about future versions of MongoDB not literally stripping out all their code, as if that would be reasonable, but thinking that the SSPL's requirement to have all web service providers furnish their code to not only be bad, but against the nature of open source. It seems like a very opportunistic plea to allow closed source massive corporations to continue to stay closed as long as it benefits them, while Mongo must find a way to replace literally millions of lines of code if they ever want to ethically pull up a front against their labor getting scraped by Amazon with pennies of effort.
Greed cuts both ways, and I subjectively see the people complaining as getting a lot more for their money (zero dollars and their choice to learn the product) than most consumers in any other industry would.
y-c-c@reddit
I mean, obviously no one forced anyone to do anything. We are talking about goodwill here. And the free tractor example would absolutely garner badwill in the real world too, as tractors eventually get outdated and people have to find replacements, and a lot of people would likely go elsewhere.
Remember, you were asking why the animosity exists, not whether MongoDB can do this, or whether they make/lose money.
Either way I'm not going to try to change your mind. You asked why people don't like it and I explained it. Have a good day.
cat_in_the_wall@reddit
that's only interesting to the hyperscalers when a certain size of userbase exists. it costs a very non-trivial amount of effort to set something like this up and make it available worldwide. not worth it if there's not enough interest.
DrummerOfFenrir@reddit
Since they have batteries included things like redis and sql clients, who's to say they don't start to charge a subscription to use them?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong
magnomagna@reddit
don't know but bun being the company's main product with millions poured into it, surely the investors will want their money back
andrerav@reddit
This open source software has an unreasonable amount of effort put into marketing. What is up with that?
Elegant-Sense-1948@reddit
Pull the rug at the right moment :)
just kidding, no idea
andrerav@reddit
I checked Wikipedia:
Someone is definitely expecting to cash out on that $7M investment.
Rug pull definitely coming.
bhison@reddit
What would a rug pull be in this case?
randompoaster97@reddit
For this sort of projects what they usually do is they release something initially fully compatible with the rest of the ecosystem, but better. Later on they accumulate vendor specific extensions. IF they manage to dominate the market they release a "V2" of their product, where their once "optional extensions" are their sole identity and "the right new way of doing stuff" is. To avoid PR troubles they make the V1 way function but behind a dozen of "legacyXYZ" toggles.
mslothy@reddit
Classic Microsoft move - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. As seen effective.
edave64@reddit
I still haven't seen a good example of that strategy actually being employed and having worked.
It was coined in the context of web standards in IE, where, at least in the long term, it was such a colossal failure that edge is still suffering from the reputational damage even after switching engines.
michael0n@reddit
In a way Oracle and Microsoft databases are the living proof. They extended the SQL standard with things like financial functions and deep fast search indexes, that made projects heavily reliant on them. There are still huge industry standard software packages that require an Oracle instance to properly work.
edave64@reddit
I don't think SQL was ever much of a standard to begin with. Pretty sure even the open-source DBs can't agree on anything but the basic keywords. They definitely have plenty of custom extensions, too.
I haven't worked with different databases in a while so maybe that changed, but I'm not all that hopeful.
lenkite1@reddit
The EEE strategy is always applied even if it doesn't work in the long term - corpo monkeys don't care about long term.
Chii@reddit
it only failed because of the gov't anti-trust law suits. It is a wildly successful strategy otherwise - netscape is/was a much better browser at the time (and people, iirc, actually paid money for it).
edave64@reddit
As I understand, paying for browsers used to be normal until MS fucked over Mosaic and made IE free.
But I wouldn't consider that EEE in itself, that's just should-be-more-illegal price dumping, which is what I think really gave them the competitive advantage
Chii@reddit
the browser being free was a factor, but minor in comparison to the bundling of it into windows. And while i mentioned netscape used to be a paid product, it was not so much better that people would use it over the bundled IE.
Therefore, the market share gained from bundling was the reason for the downfall of netscape, not necessarily the pricing advantages of microsoft.
dmilin@reddit
Next.js
edave64@reddit
Can you expand on this?
As a web dev who never had any inclination to use next, this idea baffles me somewhat. Granted, I'm not in the react ecosystem, but from the outside, it seems to be doing just fine.
dmilin@reddit
They were well liked early on by a lot of developers for doing something new in an interesting way. However, as time went on, they gained a bit too much of a controlling interest in the future of React. It feels like a lot of React's new features have been too focused on what Next needs, particularly in regards to server side rendering, and these needs commonly align with what makes Next the most money.
Potential-Music-5451@reddit
Adobe are the masters of this. For decades they have gobbled up creative software competitors and killed their products to maintain their hegemony.
edave64@reddit
That's just making a monopoly, not EEE
simspelaaja@reddit
EEE is about extending open standards. Adobe's file formats and tools aren't open and have never been open.
valarauca14@reddit
In the short term (~10 years) it made them a fuckload of money.
Rarely do businesses plan for 30+ year horizon
mslothy@reddit
There can still be tremendous business success while reputation is shit (with some), eg Adobe, Oracle, IBM.
AdvancedWing6256@reddit
Btw, I wonder why this didn't happen to Node
dvidsilva@reddit
node is like a non profit with a board of directors and technical decision making protocols
Satanacchio@reddit
Node is not backed by a VC, is managed by volunteers
dangerbird2@reddit
It doesn't rely on VC funding, but it's pretty well funded via industry support and even sovereign wealth funds like Germany's. At this point, it's financially stable because so many different companies rely on the stack, there's a huge incentive to keep it properly funded (not to mention paying for employees to contribute to the project)
it almost happened to Node. Node was originally developed by the startup Joyent, which had sole control over the design and development of the project, leading to Node being forked for a time. The issue was resolved around 2015 when Joyent gave up control over the project and moved to an open governance model under the Linux Foundation.
darkwingfuck@reddit
Oh yeah, io.js, that was a million years ago in computer years
Satanacchio@reddit
It's not as well founded as you believe, only critical infra and security is covered.
IIALE34II@reddit
I think they learned something from .NET Framework. .NET still has that stigma from that, even though .NET has been great lately.
ShinyHappyREM@reddit
just like old.reddit
Bedu009@reddit
The conveniently placed fork button:
bhison@reddit
So it essentially ends up a marketing platform for the recommended vendors?
tom-dixon@reddit
Look at the Chromium and Chrome situation to see how "open source" can be used as a bait. In theory Chrome is built on top of the open source Chromium, but when Google decided kill adblockers in Chromium against the will of literally everybody, there was nothing anyone could do.
deelowe@reddit
GitHub is my favorite example.
cat_in_the_wall@reddit
i agree that's shitty, and frankly another google example of this is the aosp. definitely not the "real" android. but ultimately they control the projects, they can do whatever they want.
and we don't have a "right" to YouTube, so they can do whatever they want there too.
if anything were to be done, it would be to break up these massive companies. but governments are pussies and wont.
bhison@reddit
That’s a great example actually
andrerav@reddit
Commercializing the software, after taking hundreds if not thousands of free contributions from the open source community. Inevitably, it will get forked. So, anyone who relies on that software will end up with either an expensive bill or a lot of hassle.
PatagonianCowboy@reddit
This is not usually what happens with open-source projects having commercial back-up
The MOST common case, by far, is offering a fully managed cloud solution
BourbonProof@reddit
> The MOST common case, by far
.. is they go bankrupt and project dies instatntly, or gets forked and dies slowly.
Ok-Kaleidoscope5627@reddit
This. If they can get some major companies to switch to bun and their platform they have a license to print money just based on support fees. They don't need to rug pull anything.
bhison@reddit
The next/vercel relationship for example, right?
PatagonianCowboy@reddit
yep
bhison@reddit
Am I naive in thinking that’s a reasonable way to fund an open source projects? Next for instance can be self deployed, vercel just makes the developer experience better (at least that’s their claim…)
Merlindru@reddit
Rug pull? An open source project? You can just fork it if need be. Should there not be any investment-backed open source projects?
I love bun, it's making JS/TS development enjoyable. If I remember correctly, the founder previously stated they're planning to offer a hosting solution to get their investors a return.
It's seriously good. Even as a simple package manager, I always hated with passion having to wait a minute for
npm install.bun installruns in 1-5 seconds for me, always.chucker23n@reddit
That's great on paper, but in practice, you're now fracturing the community. In some cases, the fork outshines the original (perhaps LibreOffice would be an example; an even stranger one is where Blink is a successful fork of WebKit, itself a successful fork of KHTML), but what's more common is you're just creating infighting among an already small group, making each subgroup less powerful.
Chii@reddit
that is not a concern. If you have a reason to fork, the community is already fractured. Forking is how you prevent opensource from being co-opted for vested agendas.
chucker23n@reddit
Yeah, it is.
If you have a reason to fork,
Ragnagord@reddit
Whether you can fork it or not isn't really relevant. Do you want to bet your entire infrastructure on an unmaintained fork of an abandoned project?
Merlindru@reddit
Very fair point. But this is a concern with any OSS project no? Just the biggest ones are guaranteed to always be backed by someone, because there's enough interest by many people / companies
PepegaQuen@reddit
No, if they are owned by software foundation that guarantees independent governance. See Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, Python Software Foundation etc
Merlindru@reddit
Even those orgs can deprecate certain projects. Or the org ceases to exist as a whole
PepegaQuen@reddit
This happens if project stops being useful and no one wants to maintain it. Quite opposite from the commercial products, where if they are more successful, the higher probability of rug pull it becomes.
y-c-c@reddit
It's mostly a concern with companies/startups that base their entire business model on said project. We have already seen tons of examples in recent years already. MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch etc all had relicensing / forking drama. It ended up really hurting the ecosystem.
chasetheusername@reddit
But that is highly relevant - if a popular and widely used project gets rug-pulled, the open-source community (including interested companies) so far have pretty much always come through to fork & maintain.
Just look at the JDK, opentofu, mariadb, openzfs and basically every other thing oracle touched.
preethamrn@reddit
This doesn't happen as often as you're making it out to be. Either bun is an unused project which gets abandoned by the maintainers and the fork... Or it's widely adopted and well maintained.
In either case, the impact is pretty small. If it's not very used, then most people probably use the npm compatible features anyway and can just migrate back to using that. Or if it's popular then either the original maintainers will try to keep it usable and open OR a fork will pop up which fills the niche (see: podman vs docker, valkey vs redis).
Merlindru@reddit
still; i dont think you can "rug pull" something free. to me its akin to complaining that you're not getting free food at a restaurant. nobody is forcing anyone to use it, and even if you use it, you can stay on that working version for forever.
these efforts i immensely appreciate, and i think its crazy to try to paint them as any sort of establishment trying to extend-embrace-extinguish which we must resist
accepting funding = malicious intent??
Ragnagord@reddit
Until a CVE drops and there's nobody there to pick it up. Fine for a hobby project, doesn’t fly for anything serious.
That's not what I said?
Merlindru@reddit
sorry, should've written it differently. the last part was more of an elaboration on my first reply, not as a rebuttal to u
wasnt trying to put words in ur mouth. worded it badly, my bad
the CVE issue is a great point. but say you made an OSS project, and stopped maintaining it in the future. is that a rug pull too? because in both cases (no maintenance vs license change) the outcome is the same (no further free updates)
Asyncrosaurus@reddit
I still remember when Google decided to fuck us over and abandon AngularJS or when Microsoft decided to quietly pull the plug on Silverlight. No one is ever safe, independent or big company, OSS or not.
mslothy@reddit
It often comes down to license. Haven't read Buns, but by all means, a hobbyist can fork and not be bothered, but someone making a living out of something needs to be sure the licensing is ok.
Typical license is "not for commercial use, unless you pay for it". May not be today, but the rug pull coming later down the road when you are already waistdeep in sunk cost.
botiapa@reddit
Brother its one google search bun is MIT licenses
mslothy@reddit
Yeah, yeah, no need to get feisty. License can change into a more restrictive license. Happened before with other projects. At that point, a company needs to a) pay up b) maintain a fork themselves c) rely on community efforts.
andrerav@reddit
As I wrote in another comment -- when (not if) the rug pull happens, you will need to either pony up the cash for a license, or place your bets on a fork (of which there will probably be a few, for some time). I'm sure Bun is great -- with all that money fueling the development, why wouldn't it be :)
OhMySBI@reddit
If money were an indication of good software, there would be a lot more of it around.
no_hope_no_future@reddit
Alternative nodejs runtime Nodesource took 30 mil in funding and still alive after 10 years.
randompoaster97@reddit
7$M is probably peanuts money in America as far as investments go no though?
GaboureySidibe@reddit
no though yeah nah yeah?
andrerav@reddit
That's not the point.
Also, it's now $26M and their offices are in downtown San Fransisco.
Source: https://apply.workable.com/bun/j/6C85A464F7/
I would honestly think twice before building anything important using this library.
21Rollie@reddit
Idk why a new tech startup would head straight to SF. You’re tight on money and immediately spend some of it on the most expensive office space there is.
look@reddit
If you’re going to bother with a physical office at all, you have to invest in it and put it/make it some place people are willing to go. There are not a lot of engineers that are willing to commute half way to Modesto.
DeconFrost24@reddit
Is that even necessary? So many people are remote now. Software engineering in particular is perfectly suited for it.
look@reddit
Agreed, but old-school physical offices seem to be trendy in the tech startup scene right now. Thankfully, the infection seems to be mostly contained to Silicon Valley (and perhaps Seattle? I’m not as familiar with it).
I think it’s AI bubble money bringing back some of the dotcom excesses. VC money seems to be pushing it (and the 996 grind bullshit again). But there are lots of sensible startups, too, that are still embracing remote for the cost savings.
Paradox@reddit
Its not. Seattle, SF, NYC, and Toronto are all infected by it
DeconFrost24@reddit
I have mixed feelings about it. Some people need more supervision or hand holding so they're not as productive, others thrive. Linux kernel Dev is probably a great example of a massively dispersed developer community. That being said I wouldn't want to be in commercial real estate these days. Covid let that genie out of the bottle. 🤷 I'm with ya on AI bubble money. This is getting a little nuts. It's real tech but it's not magic as is being sold.
International_Cell_3@reddit
The network effects of having an office in the Bay Area aren't what they used to be but they're still significant.
randompoaster97@reddit
That is more indeed. Well, if they do pull the rug I at least hope some of the money trickles back into the real innovative project - Zig.
andrerav@reddit
They will probably take off every Zig :(
Paradox@reddit
You know what you're doing?
celluj34@reddit
You have no chance to survive make your time
raralala1@reddit
the good thing is even if they go away you can as easily to switch back to npm/pnpm, so most people I know will run bun by default if possible, unless there's certain case I don't know, there is no point of not using bun
Mission-Landscape-17@reddit
Last time I played with bun, I encountered occasional weird behaviour even on toy tutorial projects, and ended up switching back to node, because I just wanted to complete the tutorial.
findgriffin@reddit
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
ajr901@reddit
You could easily switch if you don’t use built-in Bun packages. For example Bun.file wouldn’t be directly compatible with nodejs, Bun’s SQL package doesn’t have a nodejs equivalent, Bun’s HTTP server, etc.
If you only used nodejs packages and ran them with Bun then you’re fine. But otherwise you would have to refactor your code before node could run it again.
scinos@reddit
The original plan was to provide a service to host bun projects, some variant of Edge Site Rendering.
That info was in oven.sh (the parent company), but it's gone now. There is more info in https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/s/rccBzyp1tN
ReginaldBundy@reddit
Reminds me of the $5m investment in VoidZero (an open source toolchain for JS built in Rust) with everyone trying to figure out how they will make this profitable.
manniL@reddit
And we got an answer to that yesterday 👀
ReginaldBundy@reddit
Dang, I was so busy checking my stocks that I missed this!
lightmatter501@reddit
My guess is that they’re going to offer LTS support once 1.0 goes EOL.
RevengerWizard@reddit
$7M sounds a tad bit much for a Javascript runtime
cangaroo_hamam@reddit
Guillermo Rauch, the Neanyahu cheerleader? That Guillermo Rauch?
cat_in_the_wall@reddit
the only tech you can really trust to not rug pull is haskell since their whole thing is to avoid success at all costs.
A1oso@reddit
They need to compete with Deno, which is more polished and reliable (Bun still gets multiple bug reports with segfaults every day) and has a decent serverless cloud offering. Whereas Bun still needs to figure out how to make money since they're VC funded.
popiazaza@reddit
Bun isn't perfect, but it is miles ahead of Deno.
Comparing number of bug report when Bun have a lot more users is kinda weird.
There's a reason people who tried both chose to stick with Bun instead.
A1oso@reddit
Bun doesn't have more users. Deno has both more stars on GitHub and more contributors. It's also more mature, has a robust permissions system, and has been adopted by major companies.
popiazaza@reddit
More because the project is older? Deno 1 is cool but never took off. Deno 2 is buggier and perform worse than Bun in almost every way.
Permission for Deno is a plus, but as a NodeJS drop in replacement, it's not a selling point.
What do you even mean by "adopted by major companies"? You think no one major company use Bun?
pjmlp@reddit
Nothing to do with using Zig, nothing.
Dankbeast-Paarl@reddit
Their vibe-coding doesn't help!
TankorSmash@reddit
You're onto something because you can't segfault in Javascript
Voidsheep@reddit
Happy to see the competition between Deno and Bun to be honest.
After all these years, I feel like NodeJS is still kind of a mess in terms of developer experience, and not optimal in terms of performance. So much time and energy is wasted on configuring the basics like type checking, linting, formatting and testing per project with a whole bunch of individual packages. This results in TypeScript as a whole feeling chaotic and way behind modern languages for the ease of setup.
I like that Deno is a little more opinionated and TypeScript-first, but both Deno and Bun both already provide a much better experience with reasonable defaults out of the box, bring good ideas to the table and no doubt learn from each other.
Maybe there is some sinister plan for Bun to lock people in an ecosystem to monetize, but for now I'm just happy to see they've made good improvements again, and I'm a little surprised by the cynicism of the overall reaction.
cake-day-on-feb-29@reddit
Something tells me that the problem is not so much node as it is JS...
TypeScript is a JavaScript skin which makes you feel like you're not using a meme language, but at the end of the day you still are, so yes, your feelings are just the truth.
At the end of the day you'll still be reaching for the is-equal package with 300 dependencies and wondering why your dev environment takes 10GB and you've been infected by 15 viruses...
dodecakiwi@reddit
My philosophy is if we feel like we need to bring in Typescript then we shouldn't be using JS in the first place. It's always caused more pain than not by trying to make JS something it isn't.
Swagnemitee@reddit
How is that contradicting? Open source doesn‘t mean non-profit.
valarauca14@reddit
> Its very hard to make money with free software
mpyne@reddit
If you build a thing to help solve peoples' problems, even if you give the thing away, it won't solve as many problems as it good if you don't make people aware of it.
"Making people aware of things" is just the definition of marketing. The fact that 99.9% of open source efforts are forced to rely on dirt-cheap marketing like blogs and word of mouth doesn't change that they pursue marketing too.
I personally would have enjoyed being able to do better marketing of the open source software I used to maintain.
UnidentifiedBlobject@reddit
At least it’s open source? Even if they rug pull there’ll be something decent for the community to fork?
randompoaster97@reddit
Could be for profit motivated or maybe they just love theirs software and want to show it in the best light possible. Probably a mixture of both. For profit isn't inherently bad, it's about how big of a slice of the value they generate they want to monetize.
Ragnagord@reddit
The problem with a for-profit VC-funded company is that you do need profit, or in absence of that at least an exit plan.
Where is that going to leave their users?
TomWithTime@reddit
With burnt buns in the oven
Elvennn@reddit
They raised VC money
klorophane@reddit
The issue tracker does not spark joy. So many memory vulnerabilities and bugs.
Spixmaster@reddit
The proportions of open issues.
BourbonProof@reddit
yet, they keep adding more and more code/technical debt, like their own mysql client. It's not that all of this new code makes the project more stable. It's text book example scope creep and makes it more and more impossible to fork when the VC money runs out.
No sane person would rely their business on a runtime that has such buggy code. From a quality standpoint, this project failed spectacularly, even though they use a fancy new programming language Zig. They are either too inexperienced in writing good code, or Zig is the reason this runtime is so unstable. But the reality is simpler: Stable code doesn't get attention. Features do. At least in their target audience: relatively inexperienced developers (that don't see the unstable behaviour immediately or dismiss it as not important)
metaltyphoon@reddit
Zig is the reason.
metahivemind@reddit
Do you have a brief insight into which parts of Zig are causing issues with writing code for a stable runtime?
metaltyphoon@reddit
Use of memory after being freed. The language doesn’t stop you from doing that while Rust does. Lifetime of variables aren’t enforced by the compiler so you can do w/e you want while in Rust if the compiler can’t prove an operation is memory safe it won’t even compile the program.
MaleficentCaptain114@reddit
Yikes, you weren't kidding. Those issue reports make it quite clear that their CI and testing are severely lacking, and generally seem to indicate that the codebase is a bit of a mess.
Segfaults, regressions, and silent failures. Oh my!
valarauca14@reddit
It is kind of wild when you consider they're just pulling in & linking with V8, which Google (and every hacker) beats the crap out of on a regular basis. I get linking/integrating with V8 is non trivial if you haven't activated your
gcertbut like they gotta be something fundamentally wrong.190n@reddit
Bun's JS engine is JavaScriptCore (from WebKit/Safari), not V8.
valarauca14@reddit
RIP
metaltyphoon@reddit
That’s Zig for you. Every time someone says “but but Zig > Rust” you should point to the issue tracker here. Same story with Ghostty. I thought “real professional C” developers don’t make these kind of mistakes
Kissaki0@reddit
If you prefer text over video, here's their release blog post:
https://bun.sh/blog/bun-v1.3
omniuni@reddit
Yet none of that even says what it is.
anon_cowherd@reddit
Why does everyone always want release notes to say what the product is? It's talking about a new version number. If you want to know what something is, go to the thing's main website page.
omniuni@reddit
It all depends on where something is posted. This is a generic programming subreddit, so if posting about a specific language or framework, your title should indicate what language or area of use you are posting about. For example, the title of this thread would be infinitely more useful if it started "JavaScript Web Framework:". If not there, I would hope that for example, this being a YouTube video, that in the description, it would start "This JavaScript Web Framework...". If not that, when I search for the name of the project, I'd like to get a website that is actually clear about what it is. Theirs is not. If I search for the release announcement, the title of the thread, I'd like to get a page that is clear about what it is. Theirs is not.
And frankly, at that point, I'm done. If all that doesn't get me a clear answer, I'll ask on the thread, because presumably, other people will not want to go start reading project documentation just to find out what the heck something is.
ShoddyRepeat7083@reddit
Yes, but the audience is well read so they know what Bun is, and it is quite popular. If you don't know what it is, that's YOUR problem ie you go fucking look it up yourself.
Good, and stfu.
omniuni@reddit
It's some random new project. It might be known to JavaScript developers, but it's not like that's magically everyone.
anon_cowherd@reddit
Bun's first release was in 2021. It hit 1.0 back in 2023.
To make matters worse, every single one of OP's questions were answered in the first 5-10 seconds of the linked video.
I am out of sympathy at that point.
Kissaki0@reddit
Why do you want to exclude people from participating in r/programming?
Halkcyon@reddit
Because this place is too inclusive to the point of forcing off-topic posts and conversation like this thread.
DigThatData@reddit
javascript runtime.
omniuni@reddit
So, a JavaScript web server?
Atulin@reddit
No, a Javascript runtime.
omniuni@reddit
V8 or Node? One is a runtime, one is a framework.
shamshuipopo@reddit
V8 is an engine and node is a runtime. Neither are frameworks
omniuni@reddit
How is Node not a framework?
shamshuipopo@reddit
It doesn’t dictate or provide any structure which is typically what defines a framework. Also a framework is considered to run and call your code - for example Angular, NestJS etc define specific ways of organising your code so the framework can call the classes/code you write.
NodeJS provides system APIs to speak to the OS (like a library rather than framework) and an execution environment. It is a foundation for frameworks
Atulin@reddit
It's both. It's a runtime based on JavaScriptCore JS runtime by Apple, and it's a set of APIs that make up the framework, like file IO, networking, etc.
omniuni@reddit
Oh, that's actually interesting. It's good to know KJS is still alive. I wonder how well this project works with QML/QTQuick...
DigThatData@reddit
you know, the docs are right there.
omniuni@reddit
I shouldn't need to spend 10 minutes reading documents to understand what something is. I checked the release announcement and the home page, and both were full of buzzwords and lack of actual explanation.
DigThatData@reddit
and yet you keep bothering us to tell you more information about the project which is readily accessible to you.
omniuni@reddit
At least I tried the two most common obvious places.
nickcash@reddit
It is, may Allah forgive me for saying this word, javascript
omniuni@reddit
What about JavaScript? Is it a framework? A package manager? A database frontend? Even reading their website, I can't tell. It might as well be the output of an LLM told to make a website for a successful JavaScript product that does "things".
Ethesen@reddit
How is this not clear?
omniuni@reddit
So it's, what, a set of scripts that lets you pick some popular components and sets them up? It sounds like they threw the JavaScript ecosystem in a blender, called it a toolkit, and ran to the bank.
dontquestionmyaction@reddit
What? Huh?
It's fine to not know something, don't act like it doesn't make sense though.
omniuni@reddit
It doesn't. From what I gather now, it is a web server and framework based on Apple's fork of KJS to replace V8 and Node. But it's such a wide scope of functionality rolled into one project that it practically sounds like gibberish just rolling together a bunch of related terms.
dontquestionmyaction@reddit
It's a JS runtime with integrated CLI tooling. Rather than splitting everything into seven billion packages, it has a very large standard library that integrates with each other easily.
Is that clearer?
omniuni@reddit
Well, the runtime is Apple's fork of KJS, this is the set of libraries to replace the core parts of Node in order to use it for a server, correct?
CaptainBlase@reddit
Yes. Bun uses JavaScriptCore which along with WebCore make up WebKit which powers safari. JSC is the JS engine bun uses to parse and compile javascript. The runtime creates an instance of JSC and interfaces with from Zig code. The bun runtime is written in Zig and includes a large standard library also written in Zig.
The runtime also includes a typescript lexer/parser. It will read a ts file, turn it into JS, and run it through JSC.
You can do things like write a TS script that reads a YAML file and writes the data contained into a sqlite database without installing a single package from NPM or elsewhere.
It's very fast too.
dontquestionmyaction@reddit
It's fine to dislike large stdlibs and default CLI tooling, but that's an opinion, not anything objective. It's a very common method nowadays; languages like Golang and Rust follow the same paradigm.
femio@reddit
do you just not work with javascript? your confusion belies your ignorance, no need to try to hide it behind snark
IchabaldCrang1982@reddit
You have to be deep in the JavaScript community to get what Bun is. React isn't a framework, and it has no "way", so React users fixate on stuff at the paradigm/lirbary/tooling/runtime level. The stuff a framework does for you
ivarpuvar@reddit
I don't understand the purpose of BUN. I just tried it out today, and I don't see why you would use it instead of PNPM. I use PNPM and TSX, and everything just works. I can watch my project with watch, and I don't see any reason to use BUN. It might have 10ms faster start time, but that is not the bottleneck. I would especially avoid BUN because it is VC-funded.
Kissaki0@reddit
Looks like pnpm is a package manager only, not a runtime?
ivarpuvar@reddit
It’s true. But node + tsx work perfectly fine for typescript projects. Now if you said bun’s runtime is faster than node I would be interested. But for instance this post says there is no difference: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/s/XTHPMY5HH1
Halkcyon@reddit
The main issue is how much configuration you need to write to get started.
TankorSmash@reddit
You'd use bun instead of deno or node, I don't know how [p]npm fits into it.
Halkcyon@reddit
Because bun is also a package manager. They're building a tool to replace ALL JS tooling.
Devatator_@reddit
It's faster than everything else I've tried. Simple as that. Also it was one of the first runtimes to support running .ts scripts directly
jaktonik@reddit
What kind of "faster" - like a second or two faster at normal stuff, or like a factor of magnitude? Curious about specific experiences like dep installs, starting dev servers, etc
Godd2@reddit
A lot of the speedups they focus on are in the overhead costs like installs/package management/startup time.
danskal@reddit
If you watch the video, they claim 70x speedup for some use case (I don't recall which)
Devatator_@reddit
I mostly use it as a package manager (and occasionally for scripting with Typescript). The first time I tried it I think it did a bun install in like 2-4 seconds? As opposed to over 30 with Node.
It supposedly is faster when running apps on it but I haven't checked much since most of my stuff ends up as static files which do not need to be run on the runtime
_hypnoCode@reddit
I don't understand the purpose of Bun either, but it's a runtime like Node or Deno not a package manager like pnpm.
joeyignorant@reddit
you lost me at buntime lol
SeeTigerLearn@reddit
I commend how comfortable they all appeared in front of a camera. They were pert near as smooth as professional broadcasters—a nice change from that super cringe ChatGPT Agent launch where they all sat on the half circle sofa.
One_Being7941@reddit
What is it?
Paper-Superb@reddit
Should I finally switch to bun? I have been thinking about it. Can Anybody who actually switched tell me about the tradeoffs? Majorly concerned with what would be the cons of switching, the performance pros are pretty much known to everyone.
popiazaza@reddit
You should. Everything is perfect, until it doesn't.
For development, Bun is 100% ready. For production, I still facing bugs from time to time.
If you are not using NextJS, Bun is a perfect choice.
If you are using NextJS with Bun, you are now facing 2 not so stable projects who doesn't communicate with each other.
pratzc07@reddit
Is bun trying to be rails of JS ?
mahdi_lky@reddit (OP)
how?
they might be trying to make it like a Hono/Express though. it already has many of the features minimal frameworks.
pratzc07@reddit
Adding sql, redis integration and now almost getting a fullstack support going all this points more towards Rails than Express/Hono
Ashleighna99@reddit
Bun’s shipping fast primitives, not Rails-style conventions. Rails means opinions: routing, generators, ORM, migrations, scaffolds. Bun still leans Hono/Express. I pair Supabase (auth/Postgres) and Upstash (serverless Redis), with DreamFactory when I need quick REST over legacy MySQL. Expect primitives, not a full-stack framework.
mistyharsh@reddit
At this rate, it's definitely gonna be less of a runtime but more TypeScript web application framework.
Curious to see how the rest of the community responds to this. So far, maintaining loose coupling is considered a good practice. Reminds me of the Ballerina language and its ecosystem.
light24bulbs@reddit
Bun is literally everything. It's always astounding me that it's not really one part of the stack but it's a complete rebuild of the JavaScript ecosystem, backwards compatible with what we have. It's actually fucking amazing if you've used it.
mistyharsh@reddit
I am using it as a test runner and package manager in some smaller projects. Yeah, it is good but I will hesitate to adopt it in enterprise domain until it crosses that minimum critical adoption threshold. Except for some development ergonomics, I do not see a major value yet. The run performance gains are not considerable enough to recommend the switch.
I guess it is likely to find an audience more for teams who are not JS-first. The bun is a complete compiler and a runtime that is similar to what many other programming language provide.
femio@reddit
not really accurate, considering on of the biggest use-cases for bun is for CLI tooling.
bobbyQuick@reddit
Yea that was my thought. They’ll need to maintain 1 million libraries, and now many in zig (which isn’t 1.0). Also if they continue to add every available library directly to std lib, then won’t it become a bloated mess at some point?
mmusket@reddit
Definitely a risk but I'd imagine monetization efforts will be more in the direction of easy integration with their cloud services.
Fact that they offer a redis and mysql client points in that direction.
Direct-Fee4474@reddit
Yeah, this is 100% going to be the path. Their market segment is effectively: "We started an app that never should have been a javascript app in javascript because we didn't want to learn another language, but now we have performance issues and the opportunity cost for switching is too high. If only there was a way we could further lock ourselves into a tiny micro-niche and ride this sunk cost fallacy to its logical end"
CherryLongjump1989@reddit
The levels of butthurt and self-delusion in this comment is off the chart.
Direct-Fee4474@reddit
... butthurt that people make stupid technical decisions that don't impact me? wtf are you talking about? butthurt that i'm not building a product where one of the open bugs is "i held down the spacebar and bun segfaulted?" lol. are you new to the internet? we've been celebrating doomed-to-failure juicero projects for ages.
CherryLongjump1989@reddit
Your argument, such as it is - since you have no idea what you're talking about - is that programmers shouldn't be allowed to switch to a newer runtime, especially if it confers some performance benefits.
Notwithstanding the fact that Bun, being a toolkit, means that it's used by people who aren't necessarily changing their runtime at all - but instead benefit from faster compilers, bundlers, package managers, test runners, etc.
Even deeper into this rabbit hole, you seem a Go programmer who appears to be woefully unaware of the various different scenarios in which Go has worse performance and shittier tooling than what's being chosen here.
Direct-Fee4474@reddit
I really don't care about webapps. I also write C, and C++ and Assembly and Rust and CUDA and Python and maybe even R and Matlab when I'm slumming it up! But I'll make sure that the next time I'm in the kernel writing a little bpf program to add a little shine and polish to a hot path that I'll think "man. this sucks. I wish I could be hemming and hawing about my language runtime. I don't spend nearly enough time worrying about solved problems."
mgeist@reddit
I laughed thank you .
femio@reddit
The amount of unintelligent comments on this topic is concerning, but this one has to take the cake by far. Truly a masterpiece in vapid copy-paste memeing.
Direct-Fee4474@reddit
$50 says you're wearing a Naruto shirt.
femio@reddit
swing and a miss, oof
BlazingFire007@reddit
Agreed. Guillermo Ranch is also an investor. Wouldn’t be surprised to see something like that at all.
And frankly, I’d much prefer it to some of the other monetization ideas in this thread
dan_vilela@reddit
how much primeagen is paying rob lee?
Shot_Worldliness_979@reddit
I can't say I'm a huge fan of the name. "buntime" is clever. "bun install" sounds too much like "uninstall".
Devatator_@reddit
That's why we can do bun add. I typically use bun add instead of install so I don't get confused (also it's shorter)
organic@reddit
big "i don't know what to do with my hands" energy
jetpacmonkey@reddit
Is every single one of their testimonials from an AI company?
DNSGeek@reddit
Is it really so hard to, I don't know, tell me wtf the project *is* in the announcement? Like, OK, Bun 1.3 is realeased. WTF is Bun and why should I care? Why isn't that normally part of these announcements? I see posts like this all the time.
aivdov@reddit
It's a patch note, they did say what they are many times before. Do you always ask what *insert thing X* is when they release a patch?
HappyAngrySquid@reddit
They generally do a good job doing that in their blog posts, which I’d guess are more popular than their videos. Also, Bun is pretty well known these days. It’s a node alternative. And it is excellent.
NotTheBluesBrothers@reddit
Neat stuff, incredibly bizarre video
BourbonProof@reddit
they don't target experienced people, they target beginners mostly from GenZ. that's why they videos look like tiktok videos, and they communication on X is basically all memes. Also hundreds of side projects with the most insane feature creep you have ever seen. Plus insanely instable runtime (search bun segfault). This project is only alive because of the marketing money spent and hype from inexperienced developers.
Macluawn@reddit
Oh I know some people who eat this devfluencer shit right up.
I kinda treat them like hobos - keep my distance from their table.
r2k-in-the-vortex@reddit
Am I the only one youtube in reddit posts don't work anymore? "Sign in to confirm that you're not a bot", thank you, I don't even have a link to the video I want to see.
mahdi_lky@reddit (OP)
added the link to description. also here
Merthod@reddit
The bun team is really smart. Vanilla Node.js feels low level and lacks clarity for the average web developer. Bun is like a runtime quasi-framework that abstracts all the lower layers, focusing on performance that not even Node.js can accomplish.
Kudos for that.
I've always had this issue with WordPress too. They keep critical utilities out in the plugin side instead of having a more robust core and the fw itself is not enough, just like the Node.js core, but here, it's too technical and leaves most practicality to userland.
Werzam@reddit
Low-key... Node exists and works ok enough...
NuncioBitis@reddit
Javascript and Typescript are still used? I thought everyone went to Python and Rust at this point.
Sarithis@reddit
I don't know why, but I couldn’t stop laughing when the intro started
iNoles@reddit
I hope they expand full-stack development like Astro, Svelte, and others.
Pykins@reddit
Getting some real "better place" vibes from the intro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso
Direct-Fee4474@reddit
Everyone in this video looks like a psychopath. If someone told me this was satire I'd say "damn, good work!"
chucker23n@reddit
They are. https://dbushell.com/notes/2025-09-10T12:08Z/
Merlindru@reddit
psychopaths for posting AI slop?
this blog makes it out like they're trying to send some coded messages through twitter somehow connected to trump mobilizations of the national guard
AI slop is largely, well, slop, but i very much doubt that a javascript runtime is part of some alt right conspiracy
chucker23n@reddit
Do you think it's normal of a fucking JS runtime to use a flag and rifles in its messaging?
Merlindru@reddit
no, i think their marketing guy tried to make a poster like the "i want you" poster and similar other posters known in pop culture
i personally think they haven't thought more than 10 seconds about it
it's poor taste and they shouldn't have posted it, or taken it down, but i don't think there was any intent beyond "hurr durr funny tweet"
p001b0y@reddit
First time I have ever heard “my squeal” used for MySQL was in this video.
Direct-Fee4474@reddit
Anyone that downvotes me is one of bun's investors. I'm not wrong. Tell me with a straight face that the railway ceo guy moves like a human being.
BlueGoliath@reddit
Thanks, I'll use this next time I'm programming in JavaScript.
Seltzer0357@reddit
When node finishes implementing native ts support in monorepo projects a lot of the appeal of bun will be gone
TehDro32@reddit
Bun release videos: come for the intensity of the speakers, stay for all the feature updates. I love it. Don't change the format.
kamikazechaser@reddit
My skweel. Ok.
Aetheus@reddit
I'm sure this is an incredibly interesting and well-polished project from an engineering perspective.
But as an "end user" (Node.js developer), I just don't see what the big draw is yet. It's... Node, but a little faster, worse compatibility with packages that depend on the Node standard lib, and ... built-in Redis / MySQL clients?
Like, I sorta get the need for "faster at any cost is better" for things like package managers, bundles, test runners, etc, which have historically been glacial in speed. I love pnpm, vite and vitest and use them whenever I'm allowed to, so it's not like I'm allergic to trying out solutions that aren't the default/incumbents.
But I've never once thought to myself, "man, Node.js is really slow for what I'm building. I'm willing to trade some compatibility for a little extra performance".