Bun, a new JavaScript runtime that has been designed for speed, has been updated with improvements including a plugin API for Bun's runtime, even faster async http server responses, and a more reliable macOS event loop.

Bun is a modern JavaScript runtime aiming at similar uses to Node or Deno. It was built from scratch to focus being fast on startup  and on providing a complete tool including bundler, transpiler and package manager.

The developer of Bun, Jarred Sumner, says it is designed as a drop-in replacement for your current JavaScript and TypeScript apps or scripts, running either on your local computer, server or on the edge.

Bun is a wrapper around JavaScriptCore, WebKit's JavaScript engine, and natively implements hundreds of Node.js and Web APIs, including around 90 percent of Node-API functions (native modules), fs, path, and Buffer.

Bun is written in Zig, a low-level programming language with manual memory management. Among the parts of Bun that have been specifically written are clients for NPM, SQLite, HTTP, WebSocket and the JSX/TypeScript transpiler.

The developers say that they've spent their time profiling, benchmarking and optimizing things, and that while the mechanisms vary for different parts of Bun, the one general theme is that Zig's low-level control over memory and lack of hidden control flow makes it much simpler to write fast software.

Sumner says the goal of Bun is to run most of the world's JavaScript outside of browsers - no-one could accuse him of lacking ambition!

The most recent version of Bun, v0.1.11 has a new plugin API for Bun's runtime, and offers two and a half times faster async http server responses. The React SSR on macOS is also twice as fast as in the previous release, and the macOS event loop is more reliable. The final change of note is the extension of support in tsconfig.json.

Bun 0.1.11 is available now.

More Information

Bun Website

Bun On GitHub

Zig Website

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