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Not to be a cynic, but I wonder how much of the motivation to create a competing runtime in recent months is in response to the eye gauging ( I know, I know. It

Not to be a cynic, but I wonder how much of the motivation to create a competing runtime in recent months is in response to the eye gauging ( I know, I know. It’s all relative ) tens of millions in funding Deno just raised. I don’t intend this as a knock on this project. Competition is good and, this space, unlike the rest of JavaScript, could do with more players. There are some promising numbers and claims here. I hope it works out. I’m genuinely posing this intellectual question of financial incentive as an theory for JavaScript fatigue as a whole. High profile threads on JavaScript fatigue trend on HackerNews multiple times a week. The wide range of theories about why web developers reinvent the wheel strangely leave out the financial incentives. Everyone claims their framework is the fast, powerful, light, batteries included, modern, retro futuristic, extensible, opinionated, configurable, zero config, minimal (3kb, gzipped minified, of course ). The list goes on. A few days ago, I was chatting with someone how all these JavaScript libraries make these words have no meaning. To demonstrate, I screenshared a bunch of landing pages. At this point, I haven’t exhaustively, in one sitting, cross referenced these landing pages. 90% of the libraries shared the same layout. 3 columns / cards with one of those hyperbolic words. Previously I thought it was pretentious and weird that Svelte marketed itself as “cybernetically enhanced web apps”. What does that even mean? Then again, none of the descriptor words like light, dynamic, and ergonomic mean much. At least Svelte was memorable. Occasionally, one of these libraries would describe their interface as being ergonomically designed. As if other developers designed their interfaces to not be ergonomic. It’s like how we’d all like to think we’re nice, good, decent people. The majority of people would not do bad stuff if they perceived it as such. I do think most JavaScript developers have good intentions. Then I’ve also seen DevRel / Evangelist types who shill their library, with disingenuous benchmarks, knowing full well there are better solutions, or that they can help make existing solutions better, to everyone’s benefit. The spoils include consulting, training, speaking fees, books, swag, collecting Patreon ( there are some controversial projects which come to mind ), resume building, GitHub activity social capital ( I’ve talked to some recruiters who were fixated on the idea that you publish code on GitHub, specifically Github, because to them, VCS=Git=GitHub, or it doesn’t exist )

firloop 4y ago
Jarred's been working on bun for over a year. I don't get the sense that it's a reaction to anything recent at all, Jarred is just super passionate about building the best JavaScript runtime.
- asciiresort 4y ago
  I don’t doubt that. The fact that this project uses Zig suggests to me the developer is talented , passionate, and willing to challenge the status quo. When you choose a lesser known language like that to tackle a hard problem, chances are you are confident in yourself and the language. The problems I pointed out with the JavaScript ecosystem as a whole is that it’s low hanging fruit. It’s not that there aren’t financial opportunities elsewhere, outside JavaScript. There definitely is. But the perception of financial incentives is the low hanging fruit, plus high reward. In this case, it will boil down to how much Bun innovates versus just being a thin wrapped around existing solutions. And again, I don’t doubt this. Skeptical, in general, but not ruling Bun out.
kristoff_it 4y ago
These are legitimate concerns. Looking at the history of bun and its current homepage the main point is that it offers a dramatic speed improvement (plus misc. quality of life stuff). At this point the ball is in your (and everyone else's) court to put these claims to the test. It should not be terribly hard to see if the speedup is worth your while or not, JS surely doesn't lack bloated projects that you can try to build. My own personal blog is a bloated Gatsby mess that takes half a minute to build. That's the one true part of the experience that nobody can falsify.
- asciiresort 4y ago
  > Replace npm run with bun run and save 160ms on every run Maybe you can’t falsify this, but it’s a question of risk vs reward. It’s currently at 0.1 release. Chances are it has a much higher chance of breaking. And when that happens, it would likely take occupy way more time to debug than the hundreds of ms saved. Also by being new, it means it has not had a chance to cover all the cases yet. That’s the devil. It’s fast now, but it’s an apples to orange comparison until Bun is at a stable release.

firloop 4y ago

Jarred's been working on bun for over a year. I don't get the sense that it's a reaction to anything recent at all, Jarred is just super passionate about building the best JavaScript runtime.

asciiresort 4y ago
I don’t doubt that. The fact that this project uses Zig suggests to me the developer is talented , passionate, and willing to challenge the status quo. When you choose a lesser known language like that to tackle a hard problem, chances are you are confident in yourself and the language. The problems I pointed out with the JavaScript ecosystem as a whole is that it’s low hanging fruit. It’s not that there aren’t financial opportunities elsewhere, outside JavaScript. There definitely is. But the perception of financial incentives is the low hanging fruit, plus high reward. In this case, it will boil down to how much Bun innovates versus just being a thin wrapped around existing solutions. And again, I don’t doubt this. Skeptical, in general, but not ruling Bun out.

kristoff_it 4y ago

These are legitimate concerns. Looking at the history of bun and its current homepage the main point is that it offers a dramatic speed improvement (plus misc. quality of life stuff). At this point the ball is in your (and everyone else's) court to put these claims to the test. It should not be terribly hard to see if the speedup is worth your while or not, JS surely doesn't lack bloated projects that you can try to build. My own personal blog is a bloated Gatsby mess that takes half a minute to build. That's the one true part of the experience that nobody can falsify.

asciiresort 4y ago
> Replace npm run with bun run and save 160ms on every run Maybe you can’t falsify this, but it’s a question of risk vs reward. It’s currently at 0.1 release. Chances are it has a much higher chance of breaking. And when that happens, it would likely take occupy way more time to debug than the hundreds of ms saved. Also by being new, it means it has not had a chance to cover all the cases yet. That’s the devil. It’s fast now, but it’s an apples to orange comparison until Bun is at a stable release.