Biggest WTF news I’ve read today. I’m not a web dev so this doesn’t affect me, but this is bizarre.
We get a closer first look at what’s around the corner for AI coding tools, and make Bun better for it
This incredibly popular tool is now going to merge with an AI company and shift gears to be turned into some forced AI hype machine. Yipee! Exactly what all the devs were hoping for! /s
For anyone wondering wtf Bun is, it’s a project championing JavaScript. It wants to replace node.js.
On a tangent, I recently switched from a cinnamon desktop (which uses TypeScript or some form of js) to KDE-plasma because I noticed that cinnamon occasionally couldn’t keep up with rapid mouse movements (and my machine is high end). KDE-plasma handles it fine and even has a “find my mouse” feature that turns doing the “draw fast circles to see if the mouse drifts all over the screen because the handler can’t keep up with the updates” into a game of “how big can I make the cursor”.
I wish the whole “let’s keep javascript as a thing” movement would just die out. Other languages aren’t hard to learn, why are so many people obsessed with sticking with js and shoehorning fixes for its massive flaws instead of just letting it die?
Not saying it should be used for everything, but it is a pretty decent language nowadays (lots of the annoying parts have been fixed in the last 15yrs). Although the main benefit imho is, that it is the closest thing we have to an interpreted language that runs everywhere.
Isn’t Python also widely supported these days?
Though I’ll always prefer compiled languages over interpreted and I think cross compiling is also in the best state it ever has been, though dependencies can complicate things still, as well as any inline assembly use.
Supported as in “you can install an interpreter on most machines”: yes
But for JS it’s already there. You can just write a program, upload it someone, send someone a link and it runs. And it’s even sandboxed.
(Although thanks to webassembly, that will be true for many more languages as well, so maybe my argument is void)
Evil spreads its tendrils further yet.
Yup, even AI companies are being infected by the evil of Javascript!
Uhoh, now the anaconda is going to want some.
Serious question for anyone who actually uses Bun:
Why are you using Bun instead of Deno or Node?
If you would have asked me 10 years ago, what were the biggest problems with JS as a whole, I would have stated:
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Poor type safety
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No standard library which leads people into dependency hell
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Poor security (installing a project should not even allow the possibility of key stealing or ransomware)
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No runtime ergonomic immutable data structures with fast equality checks (looked like it was going to be resolved with the Records and Tuples proposal, but it was withdrawn and discussions are continuing in the composites proposal)
Today I consider point 1 mostly resolved and point 4 a problem for TC39 and engine implementers, and not resolvable by runtimes themselves.
That leaves us with problems 2 and 3.
I see Node having poor solutions for 2 and 3.
I see Bun having poor solutions for 2 and 3.
I see Deno having great solutions for 2 and 3.
As far as I can tell, people have chosen Bun for either hype or speed reasons.
Hype doesn’t seem like an important reason to choose Bun since it’s always fleeting and there’s enough investment in the industry to keep each runtime going for a long time.
I do see speed being a moderate issue with JS, but that’s mainly due to:
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dependency install times which should be a one time cost, and which can be reduced anyway by using a standard library
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slow framework slop, which isn’t really a runtime issue.
So I’m not sure speed fits as a reason for choosing Bun.
I’m not sure what the other reasons are, but I’m genuinely curious.
If you’re using Bun in projects today, why have you chosen bun?
I don’t know many people who choose Bun instead of Node or Deno, but all of them do it because speed.
IMHO, I like Deno because it’s offering solutions for everything and trying to not fall into same issues Node had (same creator, trying to apologize), but eventually I run into Node because TypeScript and easy-to-use (in my experience). Anyway, Bun always has been to me like the third wheel of the bike.
Simply for convenience and speed. Nothing more.
Is Deno not convenient and fast? I am also interested in knowing why I would want to use Bun over Deno.
Bun was purely built to make building faster and the apps to be portable
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Oh goddamn it. I just started doing projects in Bun and moving some of my older projects to it.
Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck.
Same this really sucks
Why?
Yeah. I’m going to keep using it for now but definitely going back and un-reimplementing some things that I moved into the Bun API. Basically just gonna use it as a runtime in place of NodeJS.
I just really liked being able to build and distribute a single binary executable :(
I would say it should be forked but no one knows Zig haha.
I know some, it’s such a shame that one of the biggest zig projects suffered this fate, they’re also a significant contributor to the zig project
Also kinda ironic that Zig itself takes a very different direction as it has a strict no LLM policy and recently moved from GitHub to Codeberg.
Looks like it’s MIT-licensed, so it’s probably time to make a non-Anthropic fork.
I started using Claude Code myself. I got kind of obsessed with it.
Over the last several months, the GitHub username with the most merged PRs in Bun’s repo is now a Claude Code bot. We have it set up in our internal Discord and we mostly use it to help fix bugs. It opens PRs with tests that fail in the earlier system-installed version of Bun before the fix and pass in the fixed debug build of Bun. It responds to review comments. It does the whole thing.
Seems like they’ve bought into the hype.
YIKES
Not overly surprising.
Google and Salesforce have been “developing” new features and products this way for at least the last 13 years?
- Find promising small business/startup
- Buy it with your war chest money
- Force them to integrate with your systems and live inside your walled garden.
I’m not a business expert, so i want to ask:
Can you “reject” being bought?Yes but… not really.
If you’re amazingly talented and spend 10 years of your life building something amazing but have no money, when someone offers you millions you’re just gonna take it.
I mean, technically yes.
But mega corpos have so much money to throw at you that at one point, it’s hard to say no and very few people can refuse.
It is generational wealth that is being offered to the shareholders. I know I would fold.
Amazon.com acquired parent Quidsi, Inc. for $545 million on November 8, 2010. Prior to Amazon’s purchase, Amazon sold diapers at steep losses in order to undercut Diapers.com and drive down the purchase price of the company.
No. Not if they really want to buy you.
The whole Amazon diapers is insane.
The burgeoning monopoly was being noticed as early as 2011. I know this because it is why the CEO of one chain here planned out and started offering grocery deliveries.
yes, so long as you don’t them putting pressure on your suppliers and helping your competitors, I guess
Or just building a straight close of your idea and crushing you. Happened to my startup.
Getting bought is often the whole point for a founder, since that’s one of a few ways for you to get a big payday.
Getting bought only really happens if a majority of the shareholders agree to it, so you can reject it as much as you want.
It depends on how much of the company you gave away when you took on investment. If you no longer have the controlling share you can be overruled.
Man, Bun’s great, I’ve been using it since 1.0.0 essentially so that REALLY sucks
Like some of the other people commentating on this thread, I’ll look into using something else, but it’s really sad and frustrating that I need to switch things over and over again
Did you read the blog post?
Is staying open source
Yeah but why feed the beast?
Does it feed more beasts then using github in general does?
Use codeberg where possible
:(
Time to switch to yarn or something.
Yarn isn’t a JS runtime
Sure, which makes the transition suck even lol.
I guess it’s deno time :(
Bruh, deno’s great!
I bet! Just sucks to constantly be rug pulled
Hey, Deno is really good (for JS standards)
What’s bun? Some other comments mention a js runtime so is it like a V8 competitor?
A bundler, a transpiler, a runtime (designed to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js), test runner, and a package manager - all in one.
Bun’s single-file executables turned out to be perfect for distributing CLI tools. You can compile any JavaScript project into a self-contained binary—runs anywhere, even if the user doesn’t have Bun or Node installed. Works with native addons. Fast startup. Easy to distribute.
i am not a web dev, so please correct me if i am wrong, but a runtime is essentially a specific version of browser in some capacity, more comparable to blink in some sense (minus the html+css parts). so there is a js engine (v8 or firefox’s spider if i am not wrong) and that essentially just executes the js, but it needs stuff around it (think for example io or cli interface). none of the run times implement independent js engines, as they are really hard, but surrounding stuff is relatively easier, and likes of deno/node/bun implement that.
And as other commenter said - it has other stuff too, for example a package manager, transpiler (most common would be converting typescript to js i think), bundler (just makes a bundle kinda like java jar), etc.
It’s more of a node.js competitor, but it doesn’t use v8, it uses safaris js engine. https://bun.com/blog/how-bun-supports-v8-apis-without-using-v8-part-1
How misanthropic
yeah as a dev myself I saw this coming a few months back and stopped using Bun so this doesn’t surprise me. They got on the cursor hype train awhile back and that was enough for me.
Welp. Guess I’m switching to Deno.
It’s not a bad outcome. Bun is cool but has $0 revenue and some hand-wavy thing about future paid cloud services. This way, larger companies will give them a more serious shot than they would a small startup.
It still doesn’t have a revenue story, but it’s now strapped onto the side of one of the few AI companies with a decent chance of surviving the next AI Winter. And if Anthropic goes sideways, the Bun engineers can fork the code and keep going.
Why does Anthropic think they need a JS runtime though? Are they just like “well Microsoft has a command line tool for installing JS packages so we need one too”???
On the AI coding IDE side, VSCode has pretty much hoovered up everyone, mainly because JetBrains offered their own AI option, which kept competitors away. On the server side, though, integrating with AI is still wide open.
You eventually have to hit Python because of all the ML libraries. But you can run that as a separate microservice or process. Here’s a chance to do something whacky, like let JS invoke Python-ML inline, or port the main ML libraries to JS, or cross-compile JS to CUDA (just spit-balling here). It’ll be a lot easier to try these experiments than trying to push it upstream into Node.
Plus, Bun is used by a bunch of cross-platform CLI tools, including Claude Code, so they can make sure there are no breaking changes.
TBH, I’m surprised nobody’s snapped up Mojo (and Chris Lattner). They have a lot more advanced, AI-relevant, cross-platform tech.
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