Better Programming

Advice for programmers.

Follow publication

Member-only story

Is Bun the Next Big Thing After Webpack?

Jose Granja
Better Programming
Published in
7 min readMar 14, 2022
Caption by Author of bun logo
Image by Author

The future of JavaScript tooling is away from the JavaScript language. Tools like Webpack and Babel are seeing their relevance diminish by the day. Why?

Languages like Rust, Go or even Zig have proven to be more performant than JavaScript for the bundling, transpiling, and compiling process. They are not single-threaded which is beneficial when dealing with lots of files.

What would be the reason to keep the ecosystem tooling in JavaScript? Those tools are meant to be executed on the developer machines and not the browser. Furthermore, there is no need for JS Developers to debug their internals.

The SWC was one of the earliest tooling projects outside of JavaScript. Shortly after, esbuild was announced and everybody was hyped about it. Both were a real game-changer because of their performance.

The Vite 2.0 project is now using esbuild behind the scenes to deliver a performant building experience.

Recently, we saw a new player in the JavaScript tooling ecosystem: bun. It is meant to make the whole JavaScript development even faster. It is an all-batteries included tooling. It does not just speed compilation and parsing but provides its own dependency manager tooling and…

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Jose Granja
Jose Granja

Written by Jose Granja

Top Writer @Medium | 1M+ Views | Lead FE @Lingoda | I write weekly about web-development topics 📰 Support me at https://dioxmio.medium.com/membership 🙇

Write a response