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Comment by Jarred

5 hours ago

CI has always been expensive for Bun including before the acquisition. We build for [macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Android, Windows] x [ARM64, x64] and then run tests on multiple Linux distros with multiple shards, multiple macOS versions and Windows for each architecture.

We recently started cross-compiling all the builds on Linux arm64 and that made it a little faster (I wrote a CLI tool to download the correct macOS headers for cross-compilation). We also have a daily cron job that asks claude to make the slowest tests faster while adding more assertions.

I think the question for CI costs is still out there. While I do not think it should be in tunes of thousands a day but thats the skepticism presented in the article. True costs are really important to make a good decision in situations like this. One has to consider the fact that lots of people are going to use these numbers to justify the rewrite in future.

How come Bun uses Buildkite instead of self-hosting the CI infra?

  • Probably because they don't want to self-host Windows or MacOS servers when they can pay someone else to do that for them (or Linux ones, I assume that is within their wheelhouse for production but CI is a bit of a different beast to model inference).

  • Presumably because they "build for [macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Android, Windows] x [ARM64, x64]" and self hosting all of that would be time-consuming and expensive.