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Posted by remote-dev 5 days ago

I am worried about Bun(wwj.dev)
520 points | 349 commentspage 6
coolThingsFirst 5 days ago|
Bun does great on their own benchmarks.
cute_boi 5 days ago||
I used to be a fan of Bun, but the way it keeps adding bloat makes me seriously doubt its future. Also, it seems like they are doing a lot of vibe coding without taking enough time, which raises other questions.

Node.js is also more stable, and it has started supporting TypeScript out of the box. I don’t think Bun will have many advantages after Node 26.

pier25 5 days ago|
> and it has started supporting TypeScript out of the box

Node only does type stripping though. If you want proper TS support you still need a compiler.

> I don’t think Bun will have many advantages after Node 26

There are tons of advantages. For instance, Bun includes a lot of features that would need a third party dependency in Node: db driver, S3 client, watch mode, bundler, JSX support, etc.

dgellow 5 days ago||
Why would you want DB drivers and S3 clients in your runtime? That’s exactly what 3rd parties are for, you don’t want to have to update your runtime for a new version of your drivers
tpetry 5 days ago|||
And a bug in a dependency you can fix easily. One in the runtime is much harder to fix and you then must compile new versions.
NetMageSCW 5 days ago||
And a supply chain attack is much easier with too many dependencies as well.
pier25 5 days ago|||
Every approach has its pros and cons. OTOH the less you rely on third party deps, the less attack surface.
photios 5 days ago||
"Friendship ended with Bun, now pnpm is my best friend" the post...
fhn 5 days ago||
I wonder why Anthropic chose to spend money on Bun when they could have easily spend that resource on Go which is fairly easy to use and fast. I'm sure their SWEs could easily everything things in Go. Anyone have insight on why?
azuanrb 5 days ago||
If I had to guess, it comes down to speed of iteration. Claude Code is built on JavaScript, so Bun aligns well with their current stack.

Switching to Go or Rust would only make sense if performance were the main priority, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Their current setup lets them ship quickly. A rewrite in Go would likely slow that down.

Codex moved to Rust, and you can see the trade-off. Performance improved, but release velocity dropped. They’re also still catching up to Claude Code, so they don’t face the same pressure to ship as fast.

ec965 5 days ago|||
Claude is still better at writing JS than it is Go.
zwarag 5 days ago|||
My guess: JavaScript runs in the Browser as well as on the OS. That way you can train a model to be able to interact with both fairly simple. You can also see that their harness, claude-code is also written in js. So I guess they are quite invested in that language anyway.
shimman 5 days ago|||
Yeah, it's the same pattern you saw in the early react days where open source devs would try to "woo" the react core team into getting recognition to sell consulting services or courses.

The bun people likely have some fucked up incestial business relationship with some >dev manager at Anthropic and the same pattern is repeating. Only this cycle it's going straight to acquisitions, which honestly seems like a worse strategy and Anthropic will def can the bun engineers in less than <3 years or whenever they face an actual budget crunch that they can't stave off with more gulf money.

dboreham 1 day ago|||
JS is used because it's (still) the only code you can run in a browser. Although node and bun are regular OS processes, their use/popularity traces back to that browser environment one way or another.
fnoef 5 days ago|||
I’m wondering why Anthropic, who has “the most powerful, hold me bro, AI in the world” just didn’t vibe code their own, better, version of bun? haven’t Dario said that coding is cooked in 6 month, like 12 months ago?
bombcar 5 days ago|||
Is Claude better with Javascript than it is with Go code? Seems like it could be true.
silverwind 5 days ago|||
Problem with Go is the type system is rudimentary, so you can't "restrict" AIs as well as you could in Typescript.
dgellow 5 days ago|||
I don’t believe so, Go has simple rules, snd in my experience Claude is excellent at writing all the boilerplate needed
nothinkjustai 5 days ago|||
I doubt those SWEs could have used anything other than JS.
wiseowise 5 days ago||
Ironic that this comment is in thread advocating for usage of Go:

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike"

nothinkjustai 5 days ago||
Yeah they should have used Rust ;)
siva7 5 days ago||
One of them is a much more efficient but obscure programming language from a competitor, the other is what the web is built on.
debugnik 5 days ago||
In what world is Go an obscure programming language??
wiseowise 5 days ago|||
In 2026 world, whilst you're advocating for 1980.
debugnik 5 days ago||
I'm not advocating for anything in this thread, and definitely not for Go's outdated language design, although Typescript is so unsound it isn't better in my book. But obscure is not synonym for regressive.
MoonWalk 5 days ago|||
The world of many, many companies.
agosta 5 days ago||
Umm, just use Deno? Everything author seems to love about Bun exists in Deno.
MoonWalk 5 days ago|
Seriously. This baffling omission undermines the credibility of the whole thing.

"I want a serious Node.js alternative."

So you ignore the one developed by the same guy?

forrestthewoods 5 days ago||
Claude is currently unusable for me on Windows because bun keeps crashing

:(

jedisct1 5 days ago||
I’m even more worried after reading this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016880

So Bun is going to become a fully vibe-coded codebase, with important details lost in translation.

I’ve been a huge supporter of Bun, but now I’d be extremely reluctant to deploy it in production.

It’s also a bit disappointing to see Jared change his mind so quickly. He’s an incredible developer with deep knowledge of how to write clean, maintainable, efficient code. But now it feels like his talent is being sidelined, and Claude has been given full control over the codebase.

Claude Code itself seems to be built that way: they keep piling on new features every day, but it has become this big, bloated Frankenstein slug.

Bun used to be a small, elegant, clean codebase. Now I’m worried it may turn into an unreliable mess.

deanc 5 days ago||
Let them cook. Anything that they can do to get rid of the absolute hell that is dependencies in the JS ecosystem is worthwhile. I really don't care what they add as long as it's maintained
namuol 5 days ago||
I see the word “enshittify” being thrown around casually about Claude Code. We’re far from that part of the Enshittification cycle still. This is just a mismanaged product and the result of an extremely competitive market that moves too fast.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence, etc.

NetMageSCW 5 days ago||
Their third part harness move seems like more than incompetence.
estimator7292 5 days ago||
Yeah, I'm none too happy with anthropic right now, but what's happening to Claude code is just your typical garden variety mismanagement of a project that grew way too fast for its owners to reasonably handle.
sibeliuss 5 days ago|
This is all so speculative and whatevs
robomc 5 days ago|
"I have a vague concern, so I'm now using a shittier toolchain. You shouldn't do it though." is a weird post format.
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