Node.js is Dying! Bun 1.0 is Changing the JavaScript Game
Before going further, we need to explain what is javascript runtime and why we should care about its speed.
Imagine you’ve written a story in JavaScript and you need someone to read it out loud. A JavaScript runtime is like that friendly narrator who brings your story to life! It’s the special environment where your JavaScript story gets read and acted out. But let’s dive a bit deeper. Technically, this ‘narrator’ consists of components like a JavaScript Engine, which is the heart of the runtime, doing the job of understanding and running your code. It’s paired with tools like an Event Loop, which manages tasks and ensures your code doesn’t stumble on its own feet, and a Memory Heap, where all the characters (or variables) in your story get their own space. There’s also a Call Stack, which keeps track of where the story’s action is happening, scene by scene.
Intro to Bun 1.0
Bun is a new JavaScript runtime which has several major advantages over the popular Node JS and Deno. It was designed to make the apps faster without the need of adding additional complexity to the code.
It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js. So when using Bun, you don’t need node, nodemon — it has built-in watch mode, dotenv, cross-env — it reads .env files by default.
Bun also can run different files such as .js, .ts, .mjs, .jsx, .cjs and .tsx, which means now you don’t need babel, tsc, ts-node and tsx to be installed into your project.
It is a JavaScript bundler with incredible performance and esbuild-compatible plugin API, so you don’t need esbuild, webpack and parcel either.
And one of the most significant benefit over npm and yarn is its speed. Bun is npm-compatible package manager with all familiar commands that yarna and npm have. It also reads the package.json file and writes to node_modules, but 30x faster, which is a game changer.
It has built-in Jest-compatible test runner so you can write unit tests without installing additional dependencies.
As it is designed to be drop-in replacement for Node.js it has built-in support for the common Node.js modules like path, fs and net, global variables like __dirname and…