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.