So Bun is a new project that describes itself as:
“An all-in-one toolkit for JavaScript and TypeScript apps. At its core is the Bun runtime, a fast JavaScript runtime designed as a drop-in replacement for Node.js. It’s written in Zig and powered by JavaScriptCore under the hood, dramatically reducing startup times and memory usage. The
buncommand-line tool also implements a test runner, script runner, and Node.js-compatible package manager.”
Hmm… sounds interesting. And surely the benchmarks shown on the website are super impressive. And they just released version 1.0 a few months ago. But is it ready for you and me? I don’t know about you, but for me, the was a few things preventing me from trying it out at first:
Cross-platform support
I use a Mac, but I also use a Windows machine for work. So I need a tool that works on both platforms. And Bun is not available on Windows yet. I know the team do mention about using it with WSL but in a work machine, there are a lot of restrictions, so WSL is not really an option. But you must be asking, if Windows support is such a deal breaker, then why am I writing this article? Well, luckily, the team does provide a “limited, experimental native build for Windows” now, so this might not be a problem in the near future.
Online services that support it
If you host your sites on services like Netlify, Vercel, or Cloudflare Pages, then you must consider whether they support Bun or not. For me, I currently use Cloudflare Pages, and luckily, they do support Bun in their V2 build system. And I think Netlify and Vercel also already support it.