Comment by Jarred | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jarred | Hacker News Reader

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> 1) How much you think Bun's (super-appreciated!) fanatical OCD about optimizing everything "up to & outside of JSC" will translate to the post-boot performance of everyday backend apps

Bun is extremely fast at data processing tasks. Shuffling data from one place to another (disk, network, APIs, etc). We use SIMD, minimize allocations/copies and pay lots of attention to what system calls are used and how often and where. A naively implemented script in Bun that moves data using Bun’s APIs will often outperform a naively implemented program written in Rust or Go. Bun’s APIs try really hard to make the obvious & default way also the fast way.

That, and Bun’s builtin build tooling are where Bun’s performance shines.

> “Mojo of TypeScript”

I’ve thought a little about this. I think it’s a project that’d take 5+ years and crazy hard to hire the right people to do it. I think it’s mostly unnecessary though. JITs are really good. The API design is usually the reason why things aren’t as fast as they could be.

> Bun’s APIs try really hard to make the obvious & default way > also the fast way.

Nice! That makes a lot of sense, and look forward to trying them.

Fwiw I sometimes worry about the slippery slope to infra that exists on the JS side, i.e. I work a lot in a GraphQL backend, and even if Bun gave us (or really our framework, so fastify/mercurius) a super-optimized way of getting the raw bytes off the wire, Mercurius is still doing GraphQL parsing, validation, routing, response building in JS land.

Granted, I want to keep my application's business logic in TS, but naively it seems tempting to push as much of the "web framework" / "graphql framework" as possible into the native side of things, where as I think historically Node/etc API have stopped at the "here's the raw HTTP request off the wire".

> I’ve thought a little about this.

Sweet! That's awesome just to hear that it's crossed your mind. Agreed it would be a moonshot. And, yeah, I'm perfectly happy leaning into JITs and good APIs.

Thanks for the reply!

> I think it’s a project that’d take 5+ years

What are the major difficulties you see? Is this estimate for supporting all existing TS code...or as the OC said, a new language with only newly written code.

The way I naively think about it is to imagine transpiling TypeScript code to Zig code. How far could that take you?

And if you restricted how much dynamic-y stuff you could do...maybe with a linter. I always get the feeling that 90% of the business logic (sequence, selection, iteration) is that same between languages whether they are interpreted or compiled, with just some memory management stuff added on top - which can be abstracted anyway.

> A naively implemented script in Bun that moves data using Bun’s APIs will often outperform a naively implemented program written in Rust or Go.

Sounds exciting, do you have some example benchmarks I can run that show this?

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