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Comment by andyfleming | Hacker News Reader

There’s a project Nub that is meant to bring the benefits of bun to node, which you might appreciate. It also may articulate that gap as to why people like using bun.

https://nubjs.com

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What are the benefits, though?

With Bun, I have a single dependency which gives me: bundling, runtime, package management, test runner, SQLite, Postgres connectivity, S3 utilities, sane APIs (compare Bun.serve to whatever the heck I had to do in Node), routing…

Basically, Bun is giving us something between Rails and the .Net framework for Typescript. It’s become an (almost) standalone runtime for running low-dependency apps.

This:

    node + npm + vitest + vite

Turns into:

bun

That's the benefit

Throwing out a couple more benefits: bun is faster than node, dramatically so in some specific cases (websockets). Bun also has been doing a great job at building out core libs that probably don't make sense for node, such as the native inbuilt sqlite module, thereby reducing your dependency graph.

People shit on the node/npm ecosystem relentlessly for the typical inauditable deep dependency graph, and bun makes substantial improvements to that situation.

Edit: bun recently added an inbuilt api for manipulating images (resize, change formats, etc). Another good example of them adding native/faster functionality that replaces significant dependencies (in this case, likely sharp: https://www.npmjs.com/package/sharp?activeTab=versions)

I rather replace bun with deno, given that now both bun and deno are written in Rust, and Deno have even more node compatibility than bun. Deno and Node both runs on V8, while Bun runs on JSC, and Deno has a killer feature that you don't have to even run npm install to use package, you can just top-level import or await import an URL (given that you allowed it with a command prompt or bypass it competely with -A but discouraged).

I've used Deno, CucumberJS and Playwright to write E2E test suites. Zero npm install and not even deno.json or package.json

To say nothing of `bun install` being about 50 times faster than npm, and disabling most post-install hooks by default.

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