I am worried about Bun • Hacker News Board

Re: I am worried about Bun

#241

Post by thot_experiment » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

kevinmgranger wrote: post #230

thot_experiment wrote: post #227

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/

Ah my mistake, this wasn't the case last I used it, thanks for pointing this out, I checked briefly and referenced stale data.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#242

Post by STRiDEX » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

I don't think bun worked well before the acquisition. Don't get me wrong, i used it all the time for little scripts, but i would never ship a service at work on bun. Between memory issues and incompatibilities that never get fixed, it is a nice toy to me that did a great job of exposing room for improvement in nodejs.

For example, i'd been following this issue https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/14102 and eventually all the libraries shipped "if bun do x" into them, which is the opposite of compatibility.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#243

Post by crubier » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:39 PM UTC

thot_experiment wrote: post #227

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…

The Bun DX is infinitely better than Node's, especially for Typescript projects

Re: I am worried about Bun

#244

Post by tkel » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:39 PM UTC

STRiDEX wrote: post #242

I don't think bun worked well before the acquisition. Don't get me wrong, i used it all the time for little scripts, but i would never ship a service at work on bun. Between memory issues and incompatibilities that never get fixed, it is a nice toy to me that did a great job of exposing room for improvement in nodejs. For example, i'd been following this issue https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/14102 and eventuall…

Yes, I've tried to run it in production on a couple projects. I had to back out from bun to node on both. One, there were huge memory leaks like you mentioned. The other, there were API differences that threw errors, in TextDecoderStream and such. Decided I won't try again until bun v2.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#245

Post by bricss » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:40 PM UTC

Are Bun and Deno in the room with us right now?

Re: I am worried about Bun

#246

Post by antonvs » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

pton_xd wrote: post #84

AntonyGarand wrote: post #11

I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Especially given the context of both of these different context: C…

> Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Anthropic acquired Bun for their own benefit, to protect and grow their investment in Claude Code. Not for the benefit the JavaScript community at large. Sounds obvious but I gue…

> Anthropic acquired Bun for their own benefit, to protect and grow their investment in Claude Code.

I’m unclear about this. What’s the business case? I use Gemini CLI a lot, which runs on Node, and I can’t see anything that would be improved by using a different JS runtime. It’s not something you notice as a user. Node is mature, stable, and perfectly fit for the purpose.

If Anthropic were public and if these decisions were comprehensible to the average investor, an acquisition like this ought to cause the stock to plummet. Luckily for the people involved, there are no constraints like that in the current market.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#247

Post by antonvs » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

overgard wrote: post #196

AntonyGarand wrote: post #11

I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Especially given the context of both of these different context: C…

> I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Incidentally, Anthropic needs to figure out how to monetize at some point too.

It’s organizations figuring out how to monetize all the way up.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#248

Post by tkel » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:44 PM UTC

jpsimons wrote: post #185

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 Querying sqlite with tagged template literals.

https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html#databasecreatetagstoremax...

Re: I am worried about Bun

#249

Post by jwpapi » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

I think the motion that Claude Code and Anthropic has is trying to force-hide stuff from you. Some hopefully remember the shitstorm that happened, when they changed. Reading xxx.yy to reading 1 file or reading 2 files.

More changes like this came and they were not or very hard to configure. I understand the business idea behind it. Make them to use AI as much as possible, get the human out of the loop. More training data. More Token Usage JUHUU.

However I think that made Claude Code so much worse and so much more untrusthworthy. It’s a sneaky attempt to take away the driving wheel from you. And if you follow that logic, way more and way more things seem reasonable.

But mainly for now it just generated a lot of distrust for me

Re: I am worried about Bun

#250

Post by nulltrace » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

nwienert wrote: post #158

Bun has never really been well run. Every feature it had was full of bugs and gaps. And every release fixed a few but broke others. They released more major features and breaking changes in their last patch release than most software sees in two major versions. I've been using it just as a script runner and npm package manager basically, and it's incredible the amount of work you have to do to find "good" versions. W…

There's a GitHub issue for the freeze thing. Their security scanner passes the full dep list as CLI arguments, large monorepo on Linux and you blow past ARG_MAX. Spawn silently hangs, no error, --ignore-scripts doesn't help because the scanner is separate from postinstall. Been broken since 1.3.5 at least.