Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

simonw·

> More generally, it's not clear to me that there was any technical benefit to the rewrite in the first place.

The Bun 1.4 announcement claims: https://bun.com/blog/bun-v1.4

> It reduces idle CPU usage by 5x, reduces memory usage by up to 35%, and starts 50% faster on Linux.

View on HN

The announcement also makes it very clear that 1.4 isn't just a rust port of 1.3. Rust is my favorite language and it can be a bit faster than other systems languages in the right circumstances (because the compiler can make optimizations based on assumptions that wouldn't hold without the borrow checker), but numbers like those seem far more likely to be the result of other changes than the language shift.

> More generally, it's not clear to me that there was any technical benefit to the rewrite in the first place

> but numbers like those seem far more likely to be the result of other changes than the language shift.

Which one is it?

Just saw this now. The two aren't remotely in conflict. The _rewrite_ (from zig to rust) almost certainly didn't result in the performance improvements they're claiming, because rust and Zig are roughly equivalent in that regard. We know that they included other changes with the 1.4 release (in other words, 1.4 is not just 1.3, but in rust this time), so it's far more likely that those changes are responsible, not the rewrite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com