---
title: "Bun 1.0 is interesting (but not for production yet)."
date: 2023-09-13
url: https://remiam.co.uk/notes/bun-is-interesting
tags: [Bun, JavaScript Runtimes, Tooling]
read_time_minutes: 6
description: "Bun 1.0 launches in September 2023 — what we like about it, why we are not yet replacing Node in production, and where it might land in the next year."
---

# Bun 1.0 is interesting (but not for production yet).

*Published 2023-09-13 · 6 min read · by Liam (Remiam)*

Bun hit 1.0 this week. It's fast, it's ambitious, and it covers a lot of surface. We're keeping an eye on it without rewriting anything yet.

Bun shipped 1.0 last week. We've been watching it for a year, partly out of curiosity and partly because the JavaScript runtime story has been weirdly static since Node's early days. Bun is interesting. It is not yet our production answer.

## What's good

- Speed. Cold starts and dev server boots are dramatically faster than Node.
- Built-in TypeScript without a separate tool.
- A bundler, test runner, package manager and runtime in one binary.
- Native fetch, native WebSocket, sensible defaults across the surface.

## Bun vs Node, side by side

| Capability | Node.js | Bun |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Runtime engine | V8 | JavaScriptCore |
| TypeScript | Via tsx / ts-node | Built in |
| Bundler | External (esbuild, Vite, Webpack) | Built in |
| Test runner | External (Vitest, Jest) | Built in |
| Package manager | npm / pnpm / yarn | bun install (much faster) |
| Native fetch / WebSocket | Native (recent versions) | Native |
| Maturity | Battle-tested since 2009 | New, less proven |

*Node.js vs Bun, feature parity in late 2023.*

## What we're cautious about

- Compatibility edges with the long tail of npm packages. Most things work; some don't.
- Production deployment story is less battle-tested than Node's.
- When 'fast' becomes 'fast in this specific benchmark', it's worth checking against your actual workload.

> Twelve months from now, Bun is either a quiet daily tool we've forgotten was ever new, or a footnote. We think it's the first.

## Where we are using it

- Local scripts and ad-hoc tooling — Bun's start time is genuinely a quality-of-life win.
- Test suites where the dev loop matters more than the production runtime.
- Internal CLIs that don't ship to clients.

Twelve months from now, Bun is either a quiet daily tool we've forgotten was ever new, or a footnote. We think it's the first. We're keeping our production stack on Node until we've watched another year.

## References

1. [Bun — official site](https://bun.sh)
2. [Bun 1.0 launch post](https://bun.sh/blog/bun-v1.0)