You might be surprised how much startup time factors in. The last “blazing fast” Node test runner I tried had something like ~300ms of fixed overhead just to even start running a single test. None of that overhead is reported in stats, which is kind of understandable because it’s timing
your tests, not itself. But 300ms just to get started measuring is a bit much IMO.
Anyway. Last I checked Bun still handily beats SWC (and ESBuild) on basically everything, and beats Node on tons (all?) of runtime metrics. Perf has been its foundational principle from the start, and every aspect of what’s under test in the article has been specifically mentioned as optimization targets by Bun’s creator. You’ll find many of your questions answered on his Twitter[1].
One thing I think is worth adding is that Bun’s perf obsession has been percolating a lot of optimizations upstream to WebKit/JSC. So even if you don’t ever adopt Bun as a server runtime, you or your users are likely benefiting from those contributions on the client.
1: https://twitter.com/jarredsumner?s=21&t=ZMU7ao_SpJj349QDow0M...