Bun.js is a new (as of 2023) JavaScript runtime that is still very much in development, with it’s primary focus being on extreme speed. I’ve been following it for a while but until today haven’t had a good excuse to use it.
(Edit: There’s some good conversation about this post on Hacker News here)
The author, Jarred Sumner, announced on Twitter today that they have shipped a beta version of a new code bundler for Bun, showing some crazy speed increases over other bundlers. This piqued my interest, as I use a combination of Webpack, Browserify and Uglify on my side projects, in this case my tablet PWA that I built for my kids kidzfun.art, which work but are really slow.
My current workflow can result in a 5 – 7 second wait for all my JS files to rebuild when I save a file, and I thought that Bun could help with this. It turns out I was right! …. with caveats.
You can see the docs for Bun.build() at https://bun.sh/docs/cli/build , and they are well written and quite comprehensive.
My requirements were to
- Build multiple files quickly, each of which imports multiple other 3rd party files from
node_modules. - Build minified and non-minified files
- The resulting file can be included directly in a browser using a