This is extremely compelling for frontend DX.
The bundler stuff is certainly more compelling though the page doesn't specify what makes it better than rebuild except that it comes built-in... but that's where, for me, VC concerns raise their head. If I go all in on Bun bundler, what happens if the company switches their priority towards monetization and neglects the bundler? I'm going to have to unroll all the configuration work I will have done and go back to an external bundling library. And it's still not entirely clear what I gain!
Not sure how they plan on monetizing.
All valid ideas. But the involvement of VCs makes me wonder what kind of scale they're going to be expected to achieve and what will happen if they don't.
Feels like an acquisition by Cloudflare/Vercel is a more likely exit scenario.. But then if we get an HHVM repeat and most of the benefits are just introduced into Node proper what's the real value to the aquirer? Aqui-hire? Deno has raised at least $25m though, and bun $7m..
I guess most startups fail so maybe there is just no answer.
HipHop Virtual Machine was created over a decade ago to address serious performance issues with PHP. This spurred(lit a fire?) serious efforts to address the issues in PHP proper. Over a rather short period of time PHP became performant enough that HHVM was sunsetted.
I think the history here would call into question the viability of Bun as a monetary investment. It may end up a net good for the ecosystem , but if the major benefits can just be incorporated back into Node proper what are the ROI prospects?
I thought you're original comment was saying something to the effect of "VCs funded HHVM, and this feels similar."
I'd only heard of HHVM in the context of Facebook, so I was surprised to read that (but I know Phabricator was another infrastructure company spun out of FB, so it seemed possible).
It seems Bun’s major selling point is performance. I can’t say I’ve really run into massive performance concerns with Node. It isn’t earth shatteringly fast but I’m way more likely to run into IO constraints than Node speed issues.
Deno’s major selling point was that it was Node Done Right in many ways: better packaging, ES6 all the way, etc. (a pitch I was sold on!) but it seems they gave up trying to create a new ecosystem and instead are adding Node compatibility.
Alongside all of this I'm encouraged by a number of recent Node improvements like having its own test runner and built in .env support. So I’m struggling to see good reason to use either Bun or Deno. Even if I were to switch I'd need to make sure I have a concrete path back to Node should the new generation tool become unviable.