What is Bun? The New JS Runtime

like a database server locally. You can just have an SQLite a file in your folder and you can save and whatnot. And it's pretty cool. I'm a big fan of Escuelite, and it looks like they have written their own. I think it's called the ORM, One neat thing that Bun has out of the box is the ability to run a web server, and that is something that does exist with, That cold start is is really important, Implementing What do you call that? A driver or ORM?

where they're at with many of these things because there is a whole lot of stuff. Like, for instance, the web compatibility

One other thing they have here is they have,

a lot a lot here. Oh, here's Node. Js, And a tool chain for maintaining robust,

literally anywhere. And SQLite is very, very popular in, like, desktop applications because Why doesn't it just work? You know, I don't wanna have to do all this sort of overhead. And it's interesting that that just is built right in. They say it's batteries included. Yeah. Batteries included is something that I I like to hear more and more.

in

compiling with Node as well. However, in most cases, looking really, really interesting.

That's more to a framework than an environment. Yeah.

Like, this seems like the whole batteries included, except for the, like, obvious parts of, like, authentication Very excited about bun here. I I like all things buns, ham buns. Yeah. Buns buns. Yeah. Buns buns. And the button, I like it. JavaScript environment, you name it. So bunnies, pretty exciting. Like bunnies. Bunnies. I do like bunnies. Yeah. Yep.

on your system, and you can you can just keep that file in

should be used

compatibility.

essentially have a database just as a file if you have a .env file,

and apparently is very fast. So I'm wondering, like, they're doing everything here. TypeScript

This is a big old project, and I think it's one we're gonna be seeing a lot of for the time to come here. So here's a question is

Gotta love that.

or any of that stuff. So there is a lot Welcome to Syntax. In this Monday, hasty treat, we're gonna be talking about bun,

JavaScript runtime.

if your your desktop app wants to store some data, You don't need to go to an external server. You don't want to run a,

an SQL SQLite,

and image processing. That's more

section,

Crypto polyfill It. You pay for the services you actually use, not the number of the people on your team, which is important because you can scale your incident response team without adding to your bill. You get intelligent on call scheduling and escalations.

Should use hard so it seems like they have a crypto polyfill west. Crypto polyfill should use hardware accelerator,

It supports FS and Path right now, and then other APIs For the longest time, we've had Node as our JavaScript environment. And then a couple of years ago, we got Deno, which is sort of

a a SvelteKit

as well, CommonJS and text as well as ESM. So you're not gonna have to worry about,

It. You know, I think it's interesting that, IO briefly.

to replace your node command with the bun command, and it should run your thing. So instead of saying, like, node index dot j s, you would just say bun index dot j s, and that will run bun. Now it for, I believe, a potluck episode. Get ready.

I'm interested about, like, the section in their docs that say, it. Like, what's not implemented yet? Have you checked that out at all, Wes? No. I haven't. What what do they have there? So not implemented yet. Web streams via the fetch API, web streams via HTML Rewriter, web, the socket server, package hoisting that matches NPM's behavior, source maps, more recently, we haven't really had a lot of different server node run or JavaScript runtime. So It is interesting how this world's kind of changing a little bit now, and we are seeing,

and basically attempts

Node API. They call it NAPI,

is shorter than the word node. So you're gonna say 1 letter typing, and you're gonna get speed games on top of that. Yeah. So I'm just reading it here. It supports the

Although there's web crypto, so probably not.

Like sort of polyfill them, I guess, so that if you want to use like, oh, I would love to move it upon, but

them, That will be how you handle it. So if you've ever used a serverless function

We're using this one like Chihuahua JS, and that uses us internally, it uses a node a native API, and we we just can't

We've talked a little bit about what what this thing is and and maybe, like, why you might wanna use it. But, like, can you use it? I guess this is a whole another topic. So, like, can you use this thing today? I don't have to be changing out which bundler I'm using every single month just to get some big perf gains or something. So

you know, until

A lot of these modules will be built not just as node modules, but they'll be built as Like, why would you want to use JavaScript on the server? What a joke.

already

I'm under of the understanding that it should mostly just work. There are some APIs that aren't implemented yet, which we'll talk about. But I did even see, You know, there's it's nice. I like TOML,

Like, they could even be written in Dart or something like that. So to surface that to Node, they have this thing called the Node API, the n API, tool. So it's And here we are, what, like 12, 13 years later, And now we can use them

I I saw that this supports CommonJS Yeah. We had Tom on the show, the creator of Tomo. Tom's obvious minimal language.

So, I mean, I think it seems like from their intention, you should be able to start, like, applying this to real projects and seeing essentially free games. And and you you gotta love free games from doing nothing really other than just changing a word. In fact,

I so, you know,

I was like, did I get the right one? I I think so. You know, that's it's so funny without that word. It it it's always

probably crypto,

adapter for BUN. There's people. There's a whole section on using Next. Js with BUN in BUN's documentation.

like node native APIs, which is like the FS API, the path API, in nodelan will work in BUN. And then you also have,

is this just, like, the newer features? It seems like like you mentioned a lot of stuff.

Server JavaScript modules, and they'll be they'll be built in such a way that you can at least you can run them in all the different environments ideally. That's what I see happening. Yeah. It's wild how, how this landscape has changed. I mean, for so long, we had JavaScript or Node, and then we had You can rewrite it. So you could you could do something as as

Eventually, they will be all supported, so you'll be able to bring those things in. And what I The sort of what I see for the ecosystem in general is long term.

and that is for another JavaScript environment? Isn't this just Like like, it seems like we're getting excited about

characters pop up and play here.

Any modules that are native, meaning that there's lots of modules in Node land that are not written in JavaScript. They're written in c, or c plus plus or something, and they're compiled.

In in order to surface the functionality of those modules

so it's kind of interesting.

And it is. It's

and and whatnot. So it's interesting that they did not just go for JSON five, which Like, Versus Code went all in on JSON five, where any time you are writing a JSON config in Versus Code, you can do comments and and whatnot. But I wonder if there's features of TOML They're focused on performance, but they are also, Like buffer process,

where, like so that should you need to use any packages and they just include them in the language itself. And for the long This time, we had browser APIs and then we had node APIs and things like fetch didn't exist in node.

JSON five For

Yes. Yeah. He's a fan of it. This equals that. This equals that. And here's some brackets. Yeah. Don't have to worry about not having comments like you mentioned. But, Yeah. I think it's just nice. There's also a road map here that will link into the show notes so you can kind of see where they're going. They have this over in the issues, but it's an it. It's a road map. I I love road maps, especially when they're they have checkboxes because this says 17 of a 133

because of one of the problems with, package. Json is that it's a regular JSON,

tasks complete.

and you can't do things like comments and you have to have a trailing comma

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a bundler. It looks like it even has test.

a package manager, a TypeScript needs We don't have time to refactor that out.

Which means that it's, like, kind of the 1st version out there,

What is BUN? b u n. Bun JavaScript minifier, CSS minifier, You can get the full context on your service health, active alerts, and who's on call. LightStep incident response immediately pinpoints issues Like, I'll I'll just trust. I'll default to whatever whatever you said at the time because I don't wanna have to think about it.

Wes,

To focus on, now there's a new one called Bun,

Yeah. So we talked about this A couple times on the podcast here or there, and, recently, it was just, like, released as well, was it 1.0 or environmental variables. And And it's a vote of comments for JavaScript in general, so always bet on JS.

starting fast. This has an edge in mind. New levels of performance of going fast as heck, having a Script environment that runs extremely fast and starts extremely fast.

it is aiming to be on the same level as Node and Deno, But also be just works.

let's get into BUN.

0.1, Express or one of those connect

Automatically add a alt tag or any. You can do literally anything you want as it's streaming in. I always thought that was a really cool the config JSX those are not implemented just yet. And the same thing with Deno is that over time, we saw Yeah. It's I'm curious that they didn't choose transpiler,

It's interesting how Yeah.

TypeScript decorators,

There's also a config file, of course, because we gotta love config files. There is an interesting enough. Did you notice,

No. No. I didn't. Yeah. So not YAML, but Tomo. Tomo.

API,

j s s JSX pragma. I don't know what JSX pragma is, but it sounds kind of like a Love a monster or something. Rag.

that the It's it's just going to work, which you gotta love that. Right? You gotta love just being able to use TypeScript.

And maybe that signals that they will be implementing

Extends, or how the workspaces and monorepo stuff exists inside of BUN. But so far, it really feels like if you go down the list of all of the things that it is, It's kind of, an all encompassing.

for both CSS and JavaScript And the answer is really yes. It's it's not I don't wanna say it's It's not done or anything like that. There's certainly we'll talk a little bit about what's not implemented and what the road map is. But as far as installing and getting it to try to use this thing, you could It's all bun today

You just said HTML Rewriter, they don't support yet. And I just was like, hey. Isn't that that's a CloudFlare Worker thing. Web streams with HTML Rewriter. Yeah. Just streams. Yeah. Okay. Because HTML rewriters are pretty cool Cloudflare thing where you can intercept a request and as you are streaming it in,

silly as replace Scott with Scotty Specify the port that you want. Specify a fetch method. And then inside of that fetch method,

CSS parser, extends in TypeScript TS config dot JSON, so that might be a problem with your SvelteKit sites. You need that. Well, you don't need that, but they use TS, it.

like, their bundler config file is a TOML file?

In button, which is which would be really sweet. Nice. Yeah. That'd be pretty cool.

included, which also Node just that people can try. And it's a new JavaScript environment And that is fully supported, meaning that any of these modules that are native

A different JavaScript environment. It still runs JavaScript, but the API is slightly different.

and it's

It's kind of cool because like, trying to support the whole node API

rolled that out as well. So it's kinda interesting because

are only node only. It it will work. So I don't think it's necessarily going to try to replace node,

But I think it's going to try as we start to move towards more serverless and edge functions, You're gonna wanna use this if you are running a small business, a large business. You're just sending out a couple invoices. This is the one that you wanna do. You're gonna get paid faster.

That,

Flare has its own runtime.

JavaScript esque, dare I say, in some ways. Yeah.

But it's supposed to be very, very fast, and it's supposed to be

Zig It is it's a language that you may not have heard of. It's its own programming language. It's it's a general purpose language,

and it's a smaller community.

optimal, and reusable software. And Zig is kind of its Own interesting topic if we wanted to dive into Zig sometime, but Zig is a it's a tone language. And,

I don't know. It seems seems like, as far as These types of languages go whether you have, like, a Rust or or, you know, c or or Java or any of that stuff. It seems like it It's way more readable than many of those languages that I've tried to read before. It does feel

Yeah. And,

other things like the dotenv You're gonna get paid faster. 30 day free trial. Thank you FreshBooks for sponsoring.

Right across the board without having to do any polyfills,

readable stream.

and run it right.

And this is just built right into BUN. So Some of those just like easy, easy to use things. Dino had this as well where it's like, oh, yeah. Like all of us are doing this. Lots of us are using TypeScript. Lots of us are using JSX.

All of these are standard JavaScript APIs, CS. FreshBooks is the cloud accounting service for your small business.

Web APIs as well. And so we talked about this with Deno as well where they take a fetch, WebSocket,

JavaScript ecosystem.

So, like, pretty much every application that you build a node who else has their own runtime?

The older the older I get and the more things that I build, I don't want to have to build everything from scratch all the time, and I don't wanna have to pick all of these things. Now one of the interesting things they say, why you know, why is it so fast? And the answer is that they just built in Zig.

this this just looks really good because it takes a lot of the, like, My clients love FreshBooks because they're able to just log in And see it. Like, I have people send me invoices via FreshBooks, and it's great because I can just log in and see exactly how much I owe, What's been paid? What's not been paid? There's no hemming and hawing. You can pay right online. You can hook it up with their payment processor. You can hook it up with Stripe or PayPal.

the craziest,

CSD.

Monday. Monday. Monday.

Open wide dev fans, get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript, CSS, node modules, barbecue tips, get workflows, breakdancing, soft skill, web development, the hastiest,

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the tastiest web development treats coming again hot. Here is Wes Barracuda

Bun, So, you're you're saving some time because the word bun And what we're seeing here is more tools that promise to do more things In more parts of the platform, whether that is, you can get exactly into you can see when that support for HTML rewrite is coming companies.

have something that's fast here, And it solves a bunch of the annoyances. I I would imagine,

Most serverless functions are done in JavaScript. So huge vote of confidence for JavaScript. And

multiple JavaScript environments. And Escalate is pretty cool. You can

incompatibility

In the browser, you have to use JavaScript.

and we kind of answered this, but, like, maybe people are asking, like, look, why do we need

on the server in general A test runner,

across multiple. Do you have any thoughts on that? I think,

If you wanna check it out, we'll have some links for you, Ben. It's a good Ben. If you wanna check it out, check out those links in the show notes, And, give it a try. I I'm personally gonna be giving this a try. At least nothing nothing else. Just, you know, firing up a basic HTTP server and saying, alright. I did it. That's pretty cool. And, yeah, give it a try. So that's it for Bun. We will see you on Wednesday But other than that, like, We want we want the community and the type of support that other languages have had for so long. You know, there's something so nice about Rust having a built in package manager Speed, man. I think it's both I I think it's just both an opportunity to, other tools like we have Roam. That is one of those ones that's out there that wants to do everything as well. Yeah. Like, it seems like different different

And so I would imagine Jared Jared Seems like his influence for this was just kind of frustration with the current platform.

It seems to me like this is just a a way to step forward and a way to kind of fill in some of the gaps and and take control over your entire application build And at the same time, get some sick perf gains. Yeah. If anything, this is like, what a vote of confidence for JavaScript you know, this is something before it. I had before I learned about BUN, I would assume that it's it's kind of similar to most people. But before I'd I'd heard of BUN, I had not heard of Zig. And then BUN came out, And then all of a sudden, I'm I'm sure once bun hit Zig's homepage got a ton of traffic because it's it's a newer language, tree shaking,

I should say this is I don't know if we we if you mentioned that this was created by Jared's summoner.

and we're starting to see like belly rolling.

and test runner and bundler and all that stuff. You don't have to worry about it. I don't have to

I think it's just

when Jared created

the way to code for the Edge is in JavaScript.

You'll have bundling baked in. You'll have all that task runner stuff baked in the stuff that we have a note with package. Json. But then they they also promised, you know, the 20%

You could say it's like a steamed bun wrapped around the entire is the latest and greatest in the JavaScript world. It's a new JS runtime and more. We're gonna be talking all about what BUN is and why you should have it on your radar.

same, NPM compatible anything that you know and love. I'll I'll be interested to see how that compares to, like, CSPM,

faster package installs Via the

So, you know, with this, you'll have better TypeScript integration because The always bet on JS. Yeah. That is very true. Well, this has been BUN.

built in that Node. Js for the longest time just has not had built in, and then you go to land for these things. The next thing you know, there's

really talked about a whole ton, but, you know, so many other

excited to see that this is coming out. Yeah. I'm excited too because, like, we we haven't

8 different versions of them available.

Is something that people are going to be looking for, so I am pretty or, or or every image On the server, you can use literally anything you want. And when when they first rolled out Node. Js, people People are laughing Bloomberg folks have their own runtime. We did a whole show on So

and you'll get a free 30 day trial.

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form for DevOps and SREs.

You can just export default curly brackets, you have to Like, do the require dotenv because And just being like a a fully complete

those things have been standardized, and they work in Deno, and now they also work in Bun. It's kind of cool because you can just make a file,

because we now have web standards that are request and response, that are not available in JSON or if, they just don't like JSON. I think it's just nice.

and right from that, you can export a config object. And if That config object has a fetch request on it.

similar to like that. So you want to Just quickly whip up a quick little script that has a web server in it.

And you can return a response and you can do literally anything else you want inside of there asynchronously.

people don't just use the built in HTTP dot create server in Node. They usually reach for

servers. So

or a Cloudflare Worker or any of these different varieties is very much If anything, then you might be saying, oh, my gosh. Another thing. This is a huge vote of confidence both for web standards. It's implementing standard stuff. They're not rolling out their own APIs.

you can create you get the request,

Yeah. Or yeah. Asynchronously. Yeah. Okay.