Comment by ericyd

11 days ago

The author closes by enumerating some of the things they like about Bun which are not included in pnpm. The list is basically: native TS support, a vite-style bundler and a vitest/jest style test runner.

Other than a bundler, Node already has all of these. Different test runner syntax maybe but otherwise TS "just works" out of the box and their built in test runner is totally capable. Not sure I see the need for such a lament over Bun.

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ericyd

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jazzypants  11 days ago

To be fair, Node didn't have any of these things until Deno & Bun challenged it. Deno didn't seem to move the needle by itself very much for whatever reason, but Bun's existence has had a tangible effect on the Node Technical Steering Committee. I would even argue that much of the current impetus has been driven by Jarred Sumner's savvy social media marketing. It got people talking, and Node is better because of it.

Additionally, Bun's push for covering as much of the Node API as possible has pushed Deno towards the same level of compatibility, and now most code is basically runtime agnostic. I'm not sure if I'll ever actually use Bun in production, but I'm glad it exists because the JavaScript ecosystem has been much improved simply due to its existence.

  • inbx0  11 days ago

    Reminds me of the back and forth competition between Node.js and io.js that we had to endure back in the day. Worked out for the best in the end.

  • ericyd  11 days ago

    No disagreement, but this article was posted 2 days ago, the argument isn't relevant right now.

    • remote-dev  11 days ago

      I honestly did not know Node had all of these things now, but that is great to hear. Clearly I haven't been keeping up well enough.

      Node didn't have all of these features when I initially went down the path of choosing Bun, so I have a number of existing projects that have Bun baked into them.