Live data from Hacker News

I am worried about Bun

wwj.dev

231–240 of 368 posts

Re: I am worried about Bun

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how quickly people buy the "abuse" line of thinking. We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription. That is independent of which agent/harness is used. The fair/real price for profitable use is the pay per use token pricing. These labs play the game of trying to kill competition in the har…

The thing is, the harness _is_ the model at the end of the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

The source code of Claude Code and Gemini CLI contradict that.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#234

Why people use Deno and Bun over Node? I think it's neat that there are competitors for JS runtimes, but I really don't understand what advantages I'd get by swapping to one of these over Node. Bun has no REPL and worse JS engine, Deno is just Node with a restrictive, annoying permission system and no sqlite. Both claim better performance, but that only seems true in cherrypicked benchmarks, and in my tests (granted…

Deno has sqlite: https://docs.deno.com/examples/sqlite/

So does node, since v22: https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html

They even added sql template string queries like recent popular libraries in v24.

I just built a project using it.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#235

I just spent a couple hours migrating my knife sharpening website backend from Bun to Node. Feels good to avoid that lock-in. I was initially gung-ho for Bun but increasingly unsure about it. Things I'll miss for sure: - Querying sqlite with tagged template literals - Bun.password.verify being argon2 is a better default - HTML imports - JSX transpilation - Auto loading .env file https://burlyburr.com , which hits htt…

Why not just write a small helper library to add back the features you miss? Node includes SQLite and Argon2 at least, if the issue is the interface then that is easily fixed.

Claude did write me a simple wrapper so I can keep using tagged template literals in the same way with Node.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#236
> That is textbook enshittification.

Technically, no, not textbook enshittification. Enshittification was originally meant to refer to companies squeezing two-sided markets, not products just getting kinda worse.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#237

I just spent a couple hours migrating my knife sharpening website backend from Bun to Node. Feels good to avoid that lock-in. I was initially gung-ho for Bun but increasingly unsure about it. Things I'll miss for sure: - Querying sqlite with tagged template literals - Bun.password.verify being argon2 is a better default - HTML imports - JSX transpilation - Auto loading .env file https://burlyburr.com , which hits htt…

Node supports auto loading .env and also supports sqlite

Sure, but at least on Node 22 I think I have to pass `--env-file=.env` option to make it pick up .env.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#238
post #63
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". It is also bizarre that some people are still hopeful despite it being acquired by one of the most enormously unprofitable companies in the most enormously unprofitable sectors of ou…

> I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". Why? What's the risk? It's open source. Also, speaking of open source, we are happy to commit to open source projects that have no monetization, nor any plans to ever monetize.

I think parent commenter meant that what's insane is that js runtime is not treated as an utility which should never be monetized. It's as if GCC developers haven't figured out how to monetize, but they are willing to at some point.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#239
post #141
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any situations you would compare this to historically? To me, the obvious comparison seems to be Docker. Their tooling revolutionized software development and made cgroups and containerization accessible to the masses. Yet they generally seem to have failed to extract payment from users, even with managed service opportunities. It seems to me that there are substantial obstacles to monetizing a project lice…

It's a shame that VCs have corrupted a $200MM/year business into the perception as a failure. Who cares if the VCs didn't get a large return, or if the outsized impact of the software didn't quite fully capture the value created. $200MM/yr without aggressive R&D or operational costs could be an incredibly healthy business. Maybe we should stop trying to build so many billion dollar/year businesses and work on more su…

I haven’t followed Docker’s case in particular, but how much investment was required to get it to that point? If it’s a case of “How do you become a millionaire? Start as a billionaire and invest in Docker”, then the perception may have some basis.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#240

Why people use Deno and Bun over Node? I think it's neat that there are competitors for JS runtimes, but I really don't understand what advantages I'd get by swapping to one of these over Node. Bun has no REPL and worse JS engine, Deno is just Node with a restrictive, annoying permission system and no sqlite. Both claim better performance, but that only seems true in cherrypicked benchmarks, and in my tests (granted…

I like Deno because there is no "install" step for users, you just run it.
Post reply on HN