Deeper testing of Bun’s performance and compatibility against Node.js

Bun might eventually render Node.js and/or Deno irrelevant, but it’s premature to say either are dead projects

Bun is a new project aiming to be compatible with Node.js, but with huge performance gains. Not even a month into public availability, and people are claiming both the Node.js and Deno projects are dead.

What does it take to “kill” a software platform? People are still using COBOL, for example, and how many predictions have been about the death of Perl, PHP, or Java?

The Bun project makes big claims that it would be compatible with the Node.js platform while giving huge performance benefits. If true, that could easily sway a lot of software engineers to abandon Node.js. But that would take several years to unfold. Node.js is in a strong mature position and the Bun project has a lot of work to do before it could fully supplant Node.js.

But, what will happen when Bun becomes stable and mature enough to run complex applications currently running on Node.js?

What I’m interested in doing is evaluating whether Bun can run my applications as well as Node.js. I’m surely not the only person with those questions.

These claims have caught the attention of a lot of people. I’ve seen on YouTube a bunch of people running simple performance tests then crowing about how these PROVE that Bun is a lot faster than Node.js.

Of course, simple performance tests do not prove very much. As I say later, it’s a fallacy to put a lot of weight on a simple test.

That led me to attempt to run a test of a complex application on Bun. Namely, I’ve developed a static website generator system (AkashaCMS) which I use to build several websites, including techsparx.com and greentransportation.info. AkashaCMS is complex enough to provide a good test scenario. If Bun could successfully run AkashaCMS, with higher performance, that would prove the claims by the Bun team. The idea was sound, but the result was flawed.

I wrote an article under the belief that I’d managed to render my website using Bun (also on Medium), when it seems that instead I was accidentally…