Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karupan | Hacker News Reader

Using bun has been a great experience so far. I used to dread setting up typescript/jest/react/webpack for a new project with breaking changes all over the place. With bun, it’s been self contained and painless and it just works for my use. Can’t comment on the 3rd party libraries they are integrating like s3, sql etc but at least it looks like they are focused on most common/asked for ones.

Thanks for the great work and bringing some much needed sanity in the node.js tooling space!

View on HN

How does bun make a difference in the frontend tech stack that you mentioned?

not up to this point, but with this release, bun is now a bundler.

That means potentially no webpack, vite and their jungle of dependencies. It's possible to have bun as a sole dependency for your front and back end. Tbh I'll likely add React and co, but it's possible do do vanilla front end with plain web components.

Bun has always been a bundler (and package manager, and Node runtime). This release adds "HTML imports" as a way to use the bundler.

Doesn't the name "bun" come from the fact that it's a bundler?

No it's just a name. Originally it's an alternative to nodejs.

not really a bundler without a dev server that you can just set to an entry point, and css support

Last I tried (several months ago) it didn't, the built-in frontend bundler was not very useful so everybody just used 3rd party bundlers so (for most people) it would not have any meaningful differences compared to nodejs. It seems they are putting more effort in the bundler now, so it seems like it can replace plain SPA applications just fine (no SSR). The bundler is inspired by esbuild so you can expect similar capabilities.

IMO the main benefit of using their bundler is that things (imports/ES-modules, typescript, unit tests, etc) just behave the same way across build scripts, frontend code, unit tests, etc. You don't get weird errors like "oh the ?. syntax is not supported in the unit test because I didn't add the right transform to jest configuration. But works fine in the frontend where I am using babel".

But if you want to use vercel/nextjs/astro you still are not using their bundler so no better or worse there.

i have been setting up these react/ts/etc project with vite or next.js, just fine , i think you're underestimating how much progress happened in other tooling as well

Idk about next 15 but you can literally bootsrap next 13 using a single index.tsx with typescript & next being the only 2 dependencies in package.json. No typescript is fine too.

It's not new, has been the case for a few years, so honestly I don't get people complaining about next's complexity.

Bun is amazing. It’s a life hack for me. Chatgpt doesnt know much about it so there’s some productivity hit but i love bun.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com