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  • Hacker News
  • What is the right recommendation at this point for a Node alternative? Deno?
    by rao-v
  • imo, node is fine, they have done a lot to improve and the menagerie of js runtimes have largely converged
    by verdverm
  • Deno, it has a standard library and a security model.
    by spartanatreyu
  • But why do you need an alternative to node in the first place?
    by pfzero
  • Not that my opinion matters much, but I like Deno. I never tried Bun.
    by xscott
  • What’s wrong with node? Genuine question
    by rienbdj
  • I'm still waiting for v1.4 as I have committed to Bun so much. Not looking good, though.
    by tipiirai
  • What's wrong with just using Node? It's stable, has a good (and growing) standard library and has enough backing to be self sustaining.

    edit: There's also nub which is built on top of Node.js and removes some rough/legacy edges: https://github.com/nubjs/nub

    by domh
  • I've been a heavy user of Bun since 2022. The last three months of their public timeline have not looked good, so I wanted to summarize my frustration
    by tipiirai
  • This was useful to read, thanks.
    by chr15m
  • Bun has been nothing but amazing wins for me, and I really like what it enabled me to do. Two examples:

    - I have a couple of projects that handle images. I was including Sharp, but since these are side projects in a small VM, often a redeploy that recompiled Sharp just crashed the full VM (out of memory). Bun includes Bun.Image[1] natively, which is built around Sharp's API, so swapping Sharp out was very easy, and now deploys are a breeze (and swapping it in would be just as easy).

    - Bun's JSX support is a godsend. I've replaced almost all my side projects that were backend rendered from Pug, Handlebars, and other various templates I used to have to just pure JSX. Heck, this made it trivial to make a side projects where the Favicon was a dynamic SVG [2]

    [1] https://bun.com/docs/runtime/image

    [2] https://stocksreader.com/portfolio?%5Egspc=10&amzn=10&msft=1...

    by franciscop
  • I also use Bun.Image to collect image size and metadata, and also to generate low-quality image placeholders. Works great.

    Have you tried 1.4?

    by tipiirai
  • 3 months since the last stable release feels ... alright. The constant promises for a new stable release feels a bit like a self-own.

    Having said that I would have a bit more confidence in things if release just got back to a normal pace.

    by rtpg
  • https://x.com/yagiznizipli/status/2082905235459117202

    They were pleased to be faster than Go in the "Hello World" benchmark, but unfortunately, they lag behind Node.js and Deno in complex real-world workloads.

    by classicposter
  • For me the real test will be maintainability going forwards. Not a JS user.

    I suppose it’s one thing to rewrite code and make tests pass. But a lot of my own CPU cycles when coding go to making the code understandable, modular, editable etc. IME Claude is not great on these.

    Maybe it doesn’t matter? Maybe the spaghetti makes sense to Claude, and when you say “hey add this feature”, no problem?

    But maybe it will turn into a worse ball of spaghetti, with no nicely curated tests, hacks on hacks on hacks and never ending loops of whackamole of “just change this one line and rerun tests”.

    I can imagine both - let’s see.

    by rich_sasha
  • This reads like one of thouse articles in mainstream media where the author has a obvious agenda, and they think they are really clever when they write an attack piece that they think looks like objective , when it really really transparently isent.
    by jtrn
  • > The last three months have not looked good for Bun.

    Apart from pro-AI or anti-AI posturing how have the last few months not looked good for Bun, exactly? I use it daily and I've seen basically zero regressions. I get it, you don't like AI or you like Zig over Rust, or whatever. I just haven't seen any serious argument that Bun has somehow become worse software.

    > The project has over 5k open pull requests, which is the largest number of pull requests I’ve seen.

    Terrible argument, and not really an argument at all.

    > The biggest worry is, of course, the code itself.

    I agree, so look at the code and point out what's wrong with it.

    Insofar as Andrew Kelley is concerned, it's obvious he has an axe to grind and is salty about Bun embarassing Zig (which he freely admits). Not sure why you'd invoke an unreliable narrator as some sort of final nail in the coffin.

    by dvt
  • Unused code is one issue. A project called Buz[1] found over 11,000 lines of dead code from the Rust port.

    [1]: https://github.com/jazzzooo/buz

    by tipiirai
  • > how have the last few months not looked good for Bun, exactly?

    The article answers this. hint: they're not shipping.

    > I get it, you don't like AI or you like Zig over Rust, or whatever

    The article doesn't argue for either of these. hint: it's arguing that the team is not shipping.

    > Terrible argument, and not really an argument at all.

    It's an argument for the devs not shipping

    > I agree, so look at the code and point out what's wrong with it.

    It's not being shipped.

    Hope that helps.

    by frail_figure
  • >> The project has over 5k open pull requests, which is the largest number of pull requests I’ve seen.

    > Terrible argument, and not really an argument at all.

    Technically, maybe.

    But when you consider for a moment that in this pile of slop some PRs were crafted by actual people who trusted Bun and Jarred... and whose trust has been flushed down the toilet by the Rust rewrite. Well, maybe that's the price of progress. Or maybe that's a grave mistake.

    I'm not yet sure which is it.

    by egorfine
  • Legitimately curious, are you using the 1.4 canary release in a production environment?
    by dimbletimbers
  • All that sounds great. The promised of shipping for months that never came is a concern, comparatively speaking to history of the project and what is happening. But if we have user feedback suggest otherwise may be it is good.

    For most, they are still waiting for official release so they could make their own judgment, the problem is that it is still not released. I guess we should just wait a little longer.

    by ksec
  • > Apart from pro-AI or anti-AI posturing how have the last few months not looked good for Bun, exactly?

    The blog post states quite clearly that Bun stopped posting any release.

    During the Zig/pre-Rust days, Bun was posting s new release each 2-3 weeks.

    Since then, Bun's Rust migration is correlated with a complete stop of Bun's release cadence.

    by locknitpicker
  • I'm really skeptical about this rewrite I chose to adopt bun about a year ago, and I've honestly lost count of the number of issues i've submitted and the amount of time i've wasted dealing with them. If I had to make the choice again, I would probably stick with node and pnpm for serious projects We're constantly being sold on promises of -XX% ram usage, but in practice, it's often builds randomly failing for no apparent reason, memory leaks bringing applications down, and instability that ends up costing far more in engineering time than the resources saved That's why i'm worried that bun 1.4 could end up being a step backwards, once again putting into question the small amount of stability we've managed to achieve so far

    But I still strongly believe the project makes a lot of sense, and I genuinely think these issues can be solved by 2028, if the project keeps its focus on stability instead of another SDK for SQL, web sockets, image compression, or whatever comes next

    by aypineau
  • There's a lot riding on this. If the Bun rewrite fails it could lead to the U.S. and global financial system collapsing. Yes, incredible, but true.
    by hn_submit
  • > But I still strongly believe the project makes a lot of sense, and I genuinely think these issues can be solved by 2028, if the project keeps its focus on stability instead of another SDK for SQL, web sockets, image compression, or whatever comes next

    If you check the maintainer X, he's asking Claude for what features to implement next. Not only stabilizing isn't the priority, even the features implemented are random.

    by owebmaster
  • Bun 1.4 released: https://bun.com/blog/bun-v1.4 and https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases/tag/bun-v1.4.0
    by andsoitis
  • Indeed. This article didn't age well... I'm sure that the creator of the original piece will do a thoughtful self-analysis if they might have gotten something wrong, and make sure they didn't have any sort of unspoken bias in their thinking and writing!
    by jtrn
  • This reads as another weirdly personal attack against Jarred for slighting a technology stack the author prefers, citing the even weirder personal attack against Jarred written by Andrew Kelley as the sole source to justify their "biggest worry", code quality.

    Idk why people have become so invested in this.

    by joshuat
  • People _really_ don't want there to be success stories for llms and they will go through all lengths to discredit and disparage folks successfully exploring the space.
    by potsandpans