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"Oven, the company behind Bun, has raised $7m in funding" "Oven will provide incredibly fast serverless hosting & continuous integration for backend & frontend

"Oven, the company behind Bun, has raised $7m in funding" "Oven will provide incredibly fast serverless hosting & continuous integration for backend & frontend JavaScript apps" Isn't trying to dethrone node.js (by making Bun better and more popular) something worth pursuing on its own, or there is no money in that?

eatonphil 4y ago
It doesn't seem like they're going far from the Deno playbook. https://deno.com/blog/series-a https://deno.com/blog/series-a
brundolf 4y ago
Yes, there is literally no money in doing that by itself. I don't blame the developers for doing what's needed to fund the project.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  I don't know why this was downvoted, what's the monetization plan of making an improved runtime just for the sake of it with no complementary business model? Do you make it closed source and sell/subscribe it? Do you try to survive off of paid support? (A runtime should be incredibly stable and not need support). Hope you get enough donations?
solardev 4y ago
Isn't that what they're doing? Providing a monetizable system around open source software. It's the Vercel/Next.js model
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I wonder if AWS is a sleeping crocodile ready to eat all these dev-focused paas companies up (by competing or takeovers) in a while. Maybe they are waiting to see who wins first.
  - brd529 4y ago
    I’m not sure where this movement went but efforts like SSPL [1] and similar aim to make it hard for cloud providers to resell an open source product as a service. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-source-abuse/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-s...
  - solardev 4y ago
    Many of them, like Vercel, still use AWS under the hood. AWS has Amplify too. No matter what you use, Bezos wins...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
naikrovek 4y ago
I am surprised every day at how much raw human effort has gone (and continues to go) into making JavaScript into a good language, when at most 1/20th of that effort could have been used to simply replace it with something that is good to begin with.
- iainmerrick 4y ago
  The positive interpretation is that this is an example of Gall’s law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law Today’s JavaScript works because it has gradually evolved from the primordial JS which (just about) worked; at each stage in the chain it’s seen real-world usage as an in-browser language. The alternative would be to build something better from scratch -- but that never works, says Gall’s law -- or to take some other battle-hardened language (C? Java? Python?) -- but trying to adapt those to work well in the browser would hit just as many technical and political barriers as JS did in becoming a decent general-purpose language.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    Javascript has had zero barriers in becoming what it is, specifically because people are afraid to attempt to unseat it. there has never been an adult in the room willing to ask “is spending several hundred thousand person-years on this hack of a language better than starting over with something that is more thought out?” Of course it would be better to replace it, especially so in the early days when people saw what was coming. everyone just continues doing what they are doing on the assumption that either JS is the best that humans can come up with, or that it’s too difficult to unseat it. both are ways of saying “i don't want to think about that problem right now.” so then someone made the simultaneously laziest and most expensive decision ever: put JS on the server, too. now the code serving the client and the client itself get one thread each. “gosh, performance isn’t great here, but i don’t want to think about that, i have a sprint goal.” it is only recently that WASM became a thing, and adoption seems slow. it has only succeeded because it did not try to usurp JavaScript’s position, and even requires JavaScript code to interact with the page content or the user in any way. if you can’t beat ‘em, or don’t want to try, join ‘em. JS has hit zero barriers and has never been strenuously challenged at all. if it had, it would be gone. everyone just keeps throwing money at it because they don't want to think about how awful it is. Only Google attempted it with Dart, and then they got tired and gave up, because the team was (presumably) minuscule compared to the team working on JavaScript in the same effing browser.

eatonphil 4y ago

It doesn't seem like they're going far from the Deno playbook. https://deno.com/blog/series-a https://deno.com/blog/series-a

brundolf 4y ago

Yes, there is literally no money in doing that by itself. I don't blame the developers for doing what's needed to fund the project.

squeaky-clean 4y ago
I don't know why this was downvoted, what's the monetization plan of making an improved runtime just for the sake of it with no complementary business model? Do you make it closed source and sell/subscribe it? Do you try to survive off of paid support? (A runtime should be incredibly stable and not need support). Hope you get enough donations?

solardev 4y ago

Isn't that what they're doing? Providing a monetizable system around open source software. It's the Vercel/Next.js model

quickthrower2 4y ago
I wonder if AWS is a sleeping crocodile ready to eat all these dev-focused paas companies up (by competing or takeovers) in a while. Maybe they are waiting to see who wins first.
- brd529 4y ago
  I’m not sure where this movement went but efforts like SSPL [1] and similar aim to make it hard for cloud providers to resell an open source product as a service. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-source-abuse/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-s...
- solardev 4y ago
  Many of them, like Vercel, still use AWS under the hood. AWS has Amplify too. No matter what you use, Bezos wins...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

naikrovek 4y ago

I am surprised every day at how much raw human effort has gone (and continues to go) into making JavaScript into a good language, when at most 1/20th of that effort could have been used to simply replace it with something that is good to begin with.

iainmerrick 4y ago
The positive interpretation is that this is an example of Gall’s law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law Today’s JavaScript works because it has gradually evolved from the primordial JS which (just about) worked; at each stage in the chain it’s seen real-world usage as an in-browser language. The alternative would be to build something better from scratch -- but that never works, says Gall’s law -- or to take some other battle-hardened language (C? Java? Python?) -- but trying to adapt those to work well in the browser would hit just as many technical and political barriers as JS did in becoming a decent general-purpose language.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  Javascript has had zero barriers in becoming what it is, specifically because people are afraid to attempt to unseat it. there has never been an adult in the room willing to ask “is spending several hundred thousand person-years on this hack of a language better than starting over with something that is more thought out?” Of course it would be better to replace it, especially so in the early days when people saw what was coming. everyone just continues doing what they are doing on the assumption that either JS is the best that humans can come up with, or that it’s too difficult to unseat it. both are ways of saying “i don't want to think about that problem right now.” so then someone made the simultaneously laziest and most expensive decision ever: put JS on the server, too. now the code serving the client and the client itself get one thread each. “gosh, performance isn’t great here, but i don’t want to think about that, i have a sprint goal.” it is only recently that WASM became a thing, and adoption seems slow. it has only succeeded because it did not try to usurp JavaScript’s position, and even requires JavaScript code to interact with the page content or the user in any way. if you can’t beat ‘em, or don’t want to try, join ‘em. JS has hit zero barriers and has never been strenuously challenged at all. if it had, it would be gone. everyone just keeps throwing money at it because they don't want to think about how awful it is. Only Google attempted it with Dart, and then they got tired and gave up, because the team was (presumably) minuscule compared to the team working on JavaScript in the same effing browser.