Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good


cross-posted from: feddit.org/post/34303745

The last three months have not looked good for Bun. It started as one of the most impressive individual engineering projects I have seen, but has now turned into this weird AI-powered creature with continuous false promises and an increasingly frustrated community.


in reply to hallettj

I couldn't afford to do it on a project only intended for me to use. It takes "throw money at the problem" to a different level. For the same cost, he could have put up bounties and gotten open source devs excited about the port.

Edit: meant to respond to a different comment. Whatever lol.

Esta entrada fue editada (jueves, 20 de agosto de 2026, 6:48)
in reply to taco_shale032

Meanwhile, we have an entire ecosystem of JS tools being written in Rust that are absolutely amazing, including oxc, rolldown, biome, and so on. They're not awesome because they're written in Rust though, but because actual thought and effort was put into making them great. They could have been written in any language (see: eslint, prettier, vite, tsgo, and so on).

Bun was never behind for being written in Zig, but was actually pushed forward by the language to accomplish what would have been far more difficult to do in C.

What killed it was when Bun stopped committing human effort in favor of mass-produced slop. Where I used to recommend Bun, I now just recommend pnpm/Node.js.


As an aside, I've been using Boa as an embedded runtime recently, and I've been loving it. It doesn't have the performance of other options, but it's good enough™ and still has room to improve.

Esta entrada fue editada (jueves, 20 de agosto de 2026, 3:08)
in reply to Kissaki

Not really, no. From what I've seen, I believe it's based on V8? Other than that, nothing really to say except that the imports look interesting.

I generally target the web, and I haven't had a need for Deno. I could technically use it in my current personal project, but I wanted to give Boa a try rather than trying to figure out how to use Deno's bindings while navigating the limited documentation for them.

in reply to fruitcantfly

Good news: Looks like Bun's competitive with Deno again on node support.

Bad news: Bun still has poor security compared to Deno.

Wait and see news: Is bun's switch to rust going to be worth it over the long haul, or should they have worked on making their code better, or used a mix of languages where it'd make best sense to do so?

in reply to taco_shale032
In the past month, 15.8k commits came from "robobun," 1.6k commits from "autofix-ci[bot]," and 790 commits from Jarred.


No chance anybody is reviewing those. Worse, nobody else can reasonably inspect or review changes. I suspect even from release to release, you're looking basically at a new codebase, the next release invalidating all your previous assessment, and release to release assessment to be impossible.

16/30 = 533 per day. I don't know when 1.3 was, but even just the three month delay means 48k commits. Who knows how many changes per commit. Crazy numbers.

Esta entrada fue editada (viernes, 21 de agosto de 2026, 8:09)