Jarred didn't port esbuild, his vision/ambition is far beyond that for bun.
But even as a transpiler, Jarred made different decisions about the compilation process. Also time doesn't really mean the same thing, this brosef works 80hrs/week on this stuff, and he's been doing that for over a year.
He chose Zig because it's a good language for performance sensitive applications and found himself to be very productive in it.
1) using JavaScriptCore instead of V8
2) porting esbuild from Go to Zig
I have a couple of questions about (2):
1. How long did it take you to port esbuild?
2. Why did you choose to port esbuild to Zig instead of another language e.g. V?