Bun, the new JavaScript runtime, is now available in a 1.0 production-ready version, according to the developers, who have also announced an experimental Windows version.

Bun is a modern JavaScript runtime aiming at similar uses to Node or Deno. The developers describe it as a fast, all-in-one toolkit for running, building, testing, and debugging JavaScript and TypeScript, from a single file to a full-stack application. It includea a bundler, transpiler and package manager.

Bun was designed to be a drop-in replacement for your current JavaScript and TypeScript apps or scripts, running either on your local computer, server or on the edge. Written in Zig, Bun is a wrapper around JavaScriptCore, WebKit's JavaScript engine, and natively implements around 90 percent of Node-API functions.

The Bun website says Bun is fast, starting up to four times faster than Node.js, and even faster when running a TypeScript file, which requires transpilation before it can be run by Node.js.

Previous versions of Bun have provided native builds for macOS and Linux, but until now, if you wanted to run Bun on Windows, you would need to install Windows Subsystem for Linux. This version includes an experimental, native build of Bun for Windows.

The development team cautions that while the macOS and Linux builds of Bun are production-ready, the Windows build is highly experimental. At the moment, only the JavaScript runtime is supported; the package manager, test runner, and bundler have been disabled until they are more stable. In addition, the performance has so far not been optimized. The team says they plan on rapidly improving support for Windows over the coming weeks.

Bun 1.0 is available now.

More Information

Bun Website

Bun On GitHub

Zig Website

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