So Bun is a new project that describes itself as:
"An all-in-one toolkit for JavaScript and TypeScript apps. At its core is the Bun runtime, a fast JavaScript runtime designed as a drop-in replacement for Node.js. It’s written in Zig and powered by JavaScriptCore under the hood, dramatically reducing startup times and memory usage. The
buncommand-line tool also implements a test runner, script runner, and Node.js-compatible package manager."
Hmm… sounds interesting. And surely the benchmarks shown on the website are super impressive. And they just released version 1.0 a few months ago. But is it ready for you and me? I don’t know about you, but for me, the was a few things preventing me from trying it out at first:
Cross-platform support #
I use a Mac, but I also use a Windows machine for work. So I need a tool that works on both platforms. And Bun is not available on Windows yet. I know the team do mention about using it with WSL but in a work machine, there are a lot of restrictions, so WSL is not really an option. But you must be asking, if Windows support is such a deal breaker, then why am I writing this article? Well, luckily, the team does provide a "limited, experimental native build for Windows" now, so this might not be a problem in the near future.
Online services that support it #
If you host your sites on services like Netlify, Vercel, or Cloudflare Pages, then you must consider whether they support Bun or not. For me, I currently use Cloudflare Pages, and luckily, they do support Bun in their V2 build system. And I think Netlify and Vercel also already support it.