There’s been a great buzz around a new Software Development tool that promises to be a major milestone in the JavaScript ecosystem. As you may know, developing top-notch software products goes beyond Front-End and Back-End frameworks and Database Management Systems (DBMS). There’s a massive number of tools developers have to use to ensure everything works properly! In this context, JavaScript is currently the most popular programming language globally because of its maturity, versatility, and efficiency. Yet, things can get messy with all the tools required to develop JavaScript applications.
That's why a new utility belt to handle some of the most annoying aspects of JavaScript development arose! Bun is an all-encompassing JavaScript toolkit that aims to improve the Developer Experience. One of the main reasons it’s become so popular is for being a much more efficient runtime than Node.js. However, there’s much more to it than just being a runtime environment.
What is Bun in JavaScript?
Bun is a fast and all-in-one JavaScript runtime with a massive toolkit that handles built-in testing support and package management. Plus, it comes with a robust bundler, giving developers a world-class experience when building complex apps with JavaScript. Bun was created as the new big thing for JavaScript using a powerful and modern programming language called Zig. For starters, Zig can outperform Rust and even the OG programming language, C, in several tasks, which explains why Bun is so remarkably fast. It’s clear why they call it an all-in-one tool! Yet, while one might think that, since it has the power of an all-in-one tool, it wouldn’t rival the other tools’ performance, hat can’t be further from the truth!
Bun’s largely outperforms most JavaScript runtimes, bundlers, and package managers. In fact, Bun is four times quicker than Node.js when working with TypeScript and 26x times faster than pnpm! To give you a deeper perspective, it takes over 10 seconds to compile your code with an npm package, but with Bun, it takes less than half a second. Bun is powerful and has faster startup times because it uses JavaScriptCore, which tends to outperform other options like the JavaScript V8 engine.
How Does Bun Work?
As mentioned, Bun uses JavaScriptCore engine to achieve its insane performance levels. Yet, there’s more you have to know to understand how it is so efficient. With a strong focus on performance, Bun uses tagged pointers to avoid the overhead of storing function pointers separately. Bun’s team built it from the ground up with the help of many investors and collaborators. Having the luxury of building a project from scratch helped optimize, step by step, every little aspect to guarantee Bun’s performance levels. Also, they leveraged the power of Zig, which allows for manual memory usage management.
In terms of getting started, things are much easier with Bun since you no longer need tons of configuration files. That, combined with its seamless built-in TypeScript support, allows you to start writing TypeScript code in the blink of an eye. Its transpiler processes TypeScript (ts) files without any configuration. On top of that, it also has strong support for React.js and hot reloading out-of-the-box. Since it works as a package manager, it can replace any npm command with “bun run” to run scripts. Needless to say, Bun's modern features focus on speed. It’s worth noting that Bun aims for compatibility with Node.js modules. Hence, you don’t need to start from scratch, reinventing the wheel.
Bun vs. Node.js
Bun’s team has presented Bun as an all-in-one drop-in replacement for Node.js, showing that Bun is significantly faster. The fact that Bun is compatible with Node.js does make it a viable option for both new and existing projects. Yet, there are quite a few more things to take into consideration. Node.js is a much more mature tool with a vast community of developers and collaborators. Its team has been working on improving performance recently to keep up with new tools. While Bun seems faster and more convenient because of its high-performance tooling (thanks to its server-side JavaScript runtime), we must consider that, unlike Node.js, Bun’s creators used large amounts of money to build it. As a result, Bun’s team may probably try to monetize it.
Why is Bun so Powerful?
One of the main reasons Bun has become so popular is its high levels of performance. However, it wouldn’t be fair to say that Bun is all about having a blistering speed and performance. What makes Bun so special is how it eliminated most of the complexities of working with JavaScript but keeping the cool stuff. Complexities include tons of configuration files and separate tools you must use to build a JavaScript program. It solved the annoying problem of transitioning from CommonJS to ES Modules. With Bun, you can import and require in the same file. No more weird specifications.
The JavaScript cool stuff I mentioned includes React.js and TypeScript support and compatibility with Node.js and npm commands. Besides, Bun uses its own transpiler for .js, .ts, .cjs, .mjs, and .tsx files and native APIs. That also helps explain why it’s so efficient. Let’s not forget it works as a bundler, Jest-compatible test runner, and debugger. One more thing worth noting is that Bun works perfectly with Elysia.js, which claims to be nearly 20 times faster than Express and Node.js.
Final Thoughts And Conclusion
As a full-cycle digital agency focusing strongly on advanced, Server-Driven JavaScript projects, we’re very excited about how Bun's awesome features will shape the future. Although we can only endorse Node.js capabilities with stacks like MERN, we can’t ignore that Bun is a promising and robust tool. It seems clear that it'll help streamline the Product Development Lifecycle of complex applications in the JavaScript runtime landscape, also helping deliver products with seamless User Experience (UX) by enhancing the Development Experience.
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