this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
89 points (95.9% liked)
Programming
28194 readers
248 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I guess the target audience is non-coding AI skeptics looking for pseudo-intellectual takes, which appears to be a growing market. Because getting the very first technical detail, and a very basic one at that, this wrong is not a good look.
https://bun.com/
HTML title: Bun: A fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime
https://bun.com/docs/runtime
Am I missing something? How is that claim incorrect? I've never used Bun but their marketing material lines up exactly with the claim.
First of all. Strictly speaking, there is no such a thing as a TS runtime. TS compiles to JS.
Second of all, bun binds against
JavaScriptCore, which is the JS engine used in Safari. Node binds againstV8, which is the engine used by Blink (Chromium et al). Both are implemented in C++. And the latter is considered the fastest engine.Ironically, both engines are mentioned by name in the very bun blog post being discussed, which points to a problem that is almost bigger than mere tech literacy from the pseudo-intellectual OP.
Saying there's no typescript runtime is (imo) a bit pedantic - if you JIT transpile TS down to JS at run time with hot-reloading you're effectively a TS runtime. For a non-technical one-liner on Bun, I feel that is a very reasonable simplification to make.
Perhaps bun would be even faster if they bound against another JS API, but that doesn't mean that Bun isn't faster than Node.js. They claim it's 3x faster than Node in aggregate, and that can potentially be true even if they use slower machinery under the hood. Python is a slow language but a fast framework can outperform a poorly written C++ implementation.
I'm not going to defend the article, I have no horse in that race, but until I see benchmarks that say Bun isn't faster than Node in aggregate, I don't think the claim can be called "wrong" on its face.
E: that's exactly what Bun does: "Bun supports TypeScript and JSX with no configuration. Bun transpiles every file on the fly with its native transpiler before running it."
I'm going to call
cargoa Rust runtime from now on, consideringcargo-scriptexists.Take the L and move on
Which part of the statement is wrong? Bun is a TypeScript (and JavaScript) runtime and can execute TypeScript directly. Node.js can also execute TypeScript directly on relatively newish versions.
Sure, internally they execute JavaScript, but the statement as-is isn't incorrect, unless you're saying that Bun is slower.
Did the word "directly" get the same fate the word "literally" got? As in, it completely lost its real meaning?
Bundling a compiler/transpiler and directing inotify at a source directory (for glorious hot-reloading) doesn't a language "runtime" make. Otherwise, I can create "runtimes" for any language in three lines of code right now.
Are you saying
JavaScriptCoreis faster thanV8? Or is the majority of time in webshittery operations not spent on actually running code, and that's how bun "wins" ?No. Are you saying it isn't? Please cite your source if so.
My bad, they're x86/ARM64 runtimes.
You could have searched for some benchmarks yourself, instead of thinking you're winning an argument in such a stupid manner.
Note that Jarred himself (bun creator) wouldn't push against this either. Instead, he will sell you the aggregate performance talking point (as another user did), which is why I made my deliberately facetious comment about webshittery.
Why would I do that? I made no claims to its speed. You're the one making claims, so the burden of proof lies with you.
I don't really care what Jarred says though. He hasn't exactly left a good impression with the direction he's taken Bun.