alt Hacker NewsBun 1.4
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Announcing that the SSR memory leak is gone as part of a product launch is wild.
I recently pivoted to Rust for the backend development, after getting tired of the nodejs ecosystem fragmentation and how fragile things feel. Bun seems very interesting since it allows you to do so many things without pulling in 3rd party libraries and bundlers? Is anybody using it instead of nodejs? how's the experience so far? I might have to give it a try.
Yes, I know there's probably better options than Rust for building APIs, but I wanted to learn it, so why not?
I like how the "over 10 MB smaller" is dubbed, sure the video was recorded some time ago and that number changed.
For me, notably absent from the release changelog and accompanying YouTube video they were excited to trumpet in the blog back in July, and the claim (still) this took 11 days. It's August 20th.
So this is kind of a systemd for web developers. All functionality is absorbed into a vibe coded, un-auditable black box.
Maybe run it as process 1 in a future ClaudeOS.
every couple years someone rewrites the whole toolchain and we collectively agree the last one was the mistake. good to know the cycle still works.
This is a huge win for Bun & Anthropic. I've been keeping an eye on Bun development cycle since they announced the Rust rewrite and the huge drama and backlash it generated. They seem to be proving the skeptics wrong with this release.
This blog post / changelog is extremely long. Around 50 metres long on mobile.
I am in awe at how good the llm rewrite to rust is, not a single issue when running claude code for months now.
Am I the only one starting to get annoyed by Bun just due to all the surrounding drama? I was genuinely surprised this was an actual link about an update - my gut inclination opening that was Jarred probably decided to rewrite Bun to JavaScript to stay pure or something like that.
Congratulations to the Bun team!
https://bsky.app/profile/jacob.gold/post/3msvjwys7lc2t
Hey, did the memory leak really solve with slop rewrite?
I, for one, don't welcome our new AI overlords
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omfg, that's a long post.
How is this even possible?
I know we're all using AI, but Bun seems like the one singular project where there's just been a crazy increase in the amount of output, a 10x on the 10x.
How are they doing this?
This is awesome.
slightly aside, but I find it worrying that our industry treats a lot of cannon events in stride and don't organize around that idea or to mitigate the risks around that idea.
things that everybody basically just complained but ended up working out fine,
- Bun rust rewrite. - Elon Musk firing 80% of twitter by stack ranking employees by code committed - autocompletion basically just taking over everyone
maybe I'm just taking extremely outlier outcomes. but it is still fascinating to see people complain about how LLMs don't think
While it has been used by Anthropic, the main question is if it works in other Bun's 1.3 production settings. Ignoring all the improvements, if it does work and no major bug or problems occurred, We are in for some management top down "Rewrite it in Rust" action over the next few years. And perhaps even worst, management will believe in Claude feed into Claude development.
This isn't so much about Bun or Node.js any more. It is the battleground for AI and non-AI coding.
From the release video, something catching my attention:
> In Bun 1.4, I rewrote Bun in Rust. [...] I did it in 11 days, using Claude Code, and wrote about how, in our blog.
Everything else in the video is phrased as "we", and even the section in the blog post is "We rewrote Bun in Rust"[1].
There's no question Jarred did the work and deserves enormous credit for it. I just found the contrast interesting, because the video explicitly frames the rewrite as "I", whereas the rest of the release frames it as "we".
It's weird their promotional video repeats "you can do <million things> without installing dependencies", if I want headless browser testing is that wrong to install a project that offers that?
Why would I want everything reimplemented in this massive binary? Why would Bun be anymore in touch with nuances of all these different technologies then individual projects dedicated to their own speciality?
JS Runtime, Package Manager, Test Runner (both unit and headless browser), Bundler, JSX, PosgreSQL/MySQL/SQLite drivers, S3 client, Redis client, Formatter, Linter, etc.
Not to mention parsers for YAML, TOML, Markdown which are easily three separate projects worth of complexity in their own right.
I guess one clear downside is to get all these great features they're pushing for 1.4 you needed to wait until everything was ready. Given 1.3 was pushed out in October 2025, a 10 month release cycle across so many large technologies is tough. Before you give a pass because of the Rust rewrite Bun 1.2 was released in January 2025
I have to respect Jarred knows how to work the algorithm, 10 carefully crafted X teaser posts for this release spaced out over 72 hours https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner