Programming
Why You Should Use Bun
Curious what that happy onion does?
A brief overview of the tool that has it all
As a developer, you’re no stranger to the ever-evolving landscape of web development. JavaScript has been the leader of the web for years, but staying updated with everything is a constant challenge. If you’re looking to save a lot of time every day you should pay close attention to Bun.
Note: you can use Bun with Mac/Linux, but for Windows, it’s still experimental.
What is Bun exactly?
Before we dive into the specifics, let’s start with the basics. Bun is a technological leap forward. It’s designed to make your development life easier, more efficient, and more powerful than ever before.
In your JavaScript and TypeScript projects, you can upgrade the developer experience with Bun. It is a JavaScript runtime and toolkit engineered for optimal speed, featuring an integrated bundler, transpiler, testing environment, and a package manager compatible with Node.js. It even could be a good alternative to Node.js.
Bun compared to Node.js
To truly appreciate the potential of Bun, let’s compare it to its main competitor, Node.js. For years, Node.js has been the go-to choice for server-side development. But times are changing, and Bun is challenging the status quo.
Where Node.js uses Google’s V8 engine, Bun uses the JavaScriptCore engine from Safari. With this, there will be less memory used and less time needed to start. Also, Node.js is built with C++ and Bun has been built with Zig.
All the available web APIs from Node.js are also usable in Bun including fetch.
Bun as a package manager
Installing packages with Bun is way more fun because you don’t have to wait for a long time before everything is installed (compared to others). The commands are almost exactly the same as NPM. And you can still use all the available NPM packages.
Bun as a TypeScript/JavaScript bundler
When we have a lot of code, we want it to be optimized, minified, and bundled into small pieces of usable code for the browser. Normally this could take a lot of time. And besides waiting for installing packages, it’s also terrible waiting for your project to be bundled. But again with Bun, this process takes a lot less time, which results in more time doing useful stuff.
Bun as a test runner
To make sure your is production-ready, we use unit tests. Most of the time for React this is done with Jest, but Vitest was a newer and faster one. But again, there is a newcomer in town. You can replace your Jest imports with Bun imports and still use the same functions. E.g. expect and test, but has also lifecycle hooks like beforeEach andafterAll.
Why should you choose Bun?
Fast performance
In the age of impatient users, speed matters. Bun’s architecture is optimized for great performance, ensuring that your applications load at a fast speed.
Developer experience
Bun’s approach means you’ll spend less time grappling with complex setups and more time doing what you love — writing code.
Scalability
As your projects grow, Bun grows with you (not in size). Scaling your applications has never been this effortless, guaranteeing smooth user experiences even under heavy traffic.
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