Comment by fastball
1 day ago
I know Bun is kinda not the fan favorite right now with the Anthropic acquisition and the Rust re-write drama and such, but on every one of the dimensions listed in this article, I like Bun better than either Node or Deno.
The author gives his (non-technical) reason for not using bun here:
https://dbushell.com/notes/2025-09-10T12:08Z/
Wow, I was enjoying bun up to now. This is pretty insane to see.
He really doesn't though!
> My interest in the Bun JavaScript runtime evaporated when I was informed of Jarred Sumner’s connection to Peter Thiel.
Ok, he doesn't really explain it in your link, but there's another link in that text ... surely that explains it:
>Anyway, I was recently made aware of Sumner’s connection to/fandom of Peter Thiel.
WHAT CONNECTION!?!?!? Did Peter Thiel help him murder someone? Invest $100k in his project? Is he friends with his uncle?
Look I think Thiel is a toxic human being too, but he's a major Siliocn Valley figure: you can't ostracize any project with any association with him, so if you're going to avoid using an entire technology, at least have the decency to say what this giant terrible connection is!
Follow up: Thiel gave a (teenage) Summer some $$$ (ironically, the exact amount I guessed at randomly in my previous post!):
>In 2014, Peter Thiel's Thiel Foundation awarded a 19-year-old Jarred Sumner $100,000 along with mentorship.
So Thiel gave Summer, as a young starting entrepeneur, a $100k prize ... can you really fault him for liking Thiel a little after that? Apparently the OP does, and will refuse to use a technology Summer created simply because of it.
4 replies →
Is there any kind of geeky service that lists the range of political views held by the founders of all popular software products? Otherwise, maybe half the software on my computer was made by fascists, and I don't even know it.
For example, Linux — how fascist, communist, or monarchist is it? I'd also be interested to know which NVIDIA drivers are more supportive of the LGBT community—the open-source ones or the proprietary ones?
I had never even thought about this until your comment.
It's useful to know where your software comes from. If something is largely funded by one company, we know it will move in the directions favorable to that company - you can be ready for it to move in a direction that you aren't happy with. If your stance on privacy is "my software should preserve it", perhaps primary developers of that software's association with anti-privacy advocates is worth consideration. This is particularly important in OSS with it's "no guarantees, no warantees, no accountable party" disclaimers - otherwise you might get fucked over when the next release starts doing something you really don't want it to (to extend the example above: e.g. sending all the logs to google or whoever).
without having the full background here. This feels like a very valid reason
I use bun for the sole reason of it running perfectly on riscv64, while void zero is sleeping and not providing vite/tsdown/oxwhatver builds for it.
Are you using riscv64 in the cloud or desktop?
i'm very interested in RISC-V and would love to read anything you can provide.
Thanks!
Consider it my rpi. I have orange pi rv2 (8GB + 2TB NVME), it's the agentic nest where the harness runs and nfs+dlna archive is hosted. One of the agentic personas has the root. The thing is plugged into the router over Ethernet. It's not the fastest raspberry pi shaped thing on the network, but everything I needed worked without fiddling with FDT and using off-mainline builds. Somehow getting arch port to riscv64 and flashing it to microsd was enough to get things running. It probably even has functioning HDMI, but I'm not sure of that.
I like Bun too, I think its ergonomics are much better. If you are writing a front end you can produce the final output without an external bundled. Similarly if you are working on a backend TS project (less of a problem these days but transpiling TS used to be full of gotchas depending on your dependencies) . You can even just build a single binary to deploy in your container. Useful for command line tools to (they come out a bit big, but for personal use is not an issue)
Bun is awesome. It feels great these days to start with bun or convert a nodejs app over and reduce deps down, sometimes to 0.
Ive just gone all in, no more mega bash scripts that constantly bug out on the silliest problems whenever you try to do anything complex involving a list data type.
It just feels like its something you can pretty much always bend towards what you need without needing to breakout into another language and I'm keen to see some of the new performance stuff their continuing to work on.
Why did you use "mega bash scripts" with Node? That seems completely unrelated to your choice of JavaScript engine.