Some *real* benchmarks on Bun (compared with Node) -- It only wins *sometimes*, but it's mostly a fail

MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works to Programming@programming.dev – 100 points – DO NOT USE BUN (bun install is good dough)
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Great watch but to summarize:

  • Bun beats Node/Yarn for package installation

  • Somewhat better API/DX in some ways.

  • Loses poorly in testing performance

  • Tons of incompatibility issues/performance issues in other areas.

General summary: Just don't use Bun yet, seems like it needs some more time in the oven.

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Am I wrong to think that if you are REALLY crippled by the "slow speed" of node, you just shouldn't be using JS from the beginning?

In my opinion, any advancement is worthwhile, even if current consensus is that it’s over-optimization. And if it starts tying up its loose ends, it’ll no doubt benefit node developers as well. Healthy competition and all that.

I’m with you on that. I’ve built dozens and dozens of node apps both professionally and for personal projects and yeah maybe the package installs could be faster, but the overall performance of the server has also been pretty good. If node is slow for you, maybe there’s some other optimizations to be made rather than switching the next new things as a solution.

So, Bun claiming to be faster than Node is bull****, basically.

Pretty much. Their benchmarks seem to be VERY cherry picked to skew things in their favour, specially the testing framework part, where bun compares its speed to one of the slowest testing frameworks out there (jest) and claim victory.

I'm very glad that this guy actually made benchmarks instead of just reading what's on bun's site before posting a video about it.

Not at every turn though. Also it runs on Webkit instead of Googles V8 :)

I guess I don’t understand this obsession with speed? I work in development but I have never ran into a build that’s so slow that it impacts my work. Why is Node considered so bad that everyone wants to make is faster?

You’ve never had an issue with how slow npm installs?

I'm with the parent poster. How often is it hindering your work?

It's at tops, a 15-30 second wait, usually done at the start of the project.

I'm a unique use ase, where I have about 10 projects (because microservices) that I'd have to npm install, and it's still not a pain to install them.

Are people running npm install dozens of times a week on the same project? Because why?

I'm not shitting on Bun. I'm actually supporting it's growth. But until it solves some real performance bottlenecks, (switching from gulp/webpack to vite changed our compiling time from 18 seconds to 2 seconds), I can't see any reason for people to change their workflow.

It's at tops, a 15-30 second wait

First: it can be a lot longer than 15-30s. One project I work on takes around 90s for a fresh install. This used to be worse in older versions of npm, and it's worse on Windows.

Second: it also affects things like CI/CD. I prefer using Yarn 2+ for that reason (all dependencies are stored as part of your repo). It might not sound like much, but 30 extra seconds does decrease your productivity more than you might think if you have to wait for it every single time.

Ugh as a system developer I'm happy when compiling anything takes less than 5min

Hmm, npm can take up to five minutes for me. I usually just leave it alone and go do other stuff. And I have fiber internet, so it’s not download speed that’s the problem.

Build times in nodejs are not so great in even medium size projects if you make heavy usage of advanced typescript features - either yourself or through libraries like zod. So if something makes the nodejs runtime faster, it could potentially make ts compiler faster too - for which I'd be very grateful.

I don't understand it either.

I've only had issues with npm speeds when the projects were stored in a HDD, and that's not node's fault.

I guess I don’t understand this obsession with speed?

for me it hasn't been build speed but rather execution

I've run into problems with dayjs slowing down requests where I need to do a lot of processing. There are arguments to be made about replacing dayjs with datefns and how I should've been doing it differently anyway, but fact is that if the whole execution environment was twice as fast, it probably wouldn't have been much of a problem at all

because speed = your page loading fast = more clients = more satisfied clients = less environmental impact = less build time = less time downloading and lock-ing modules = more time for you ... the list goes on.

I dont understand why is it so hard to understand that ... guys ... speed ... does ... matter? Our time matters? Our anything matters? And if you dont care, I do.

Recently change node+npm+esbuild to bun runtime+package management+bundling and happy with the result.

The project is a static site built with middleman, tailwind, postcss and some frontend libraries.

It was simpler to work with for me. Node is way faster than ruby and so node speed was never an issue for me. But bun install is noticeably faster even for a small project.