What's the Deal with Bun?
I’m fascinated by the recent discourse surrounding Bun. Bun is turning into a public case study which mirrors what some of us engineers are dealing with at work - leadership has some objective, they’re convinced AI tooling can help them get there faster and cheaper, and engineers are pressured to keep up. Last December, Anthropic acquired Bun. The tool was developed by Oven, a company founded and led by Jarred Sumner. If you’re not familiar, Bun is an all-in-one JavaScript/TypeScript/JSX toolkit written in Zig with a heavy focus on performance and speed. It attempts to provide many of the capabilities which JavaScript’s messy ecosystem have struggled with - these includes webpacking and bundling, package management, DOM-compatible test running, and even the JavaScript runtime itself. The tool also chooses more sensible default behaviors, such as blocking execution of scripts for installed dependencies by default. This example makes Bun meaningfully safer than NPM* and would have decreased the blast radius of the Shai-Hulud attack (renewed in November 2025). ...