Add support for the Bun package manager

[harish-vts]

Bun is a JavaScript runtime and package manager with a focus on performance and ensuring a stellar developer experience. Since its package manager is compatible with Node.js, one can have projects that use Node.js as the runtime and only use Bun to install NPM dependencies. bun install is equivalent to npm/yarn/pnpm install, only an order of magnitude faster.

VTS has evaluated using Bun as a package manager and found it to be an easy transition from Yarn version 1. Lack of Depfu support is the only thing preventing us from replacing Yarn with Bun.

[halfbyte]

@harish-vts Thanks for your request. This is very unlikely to happen anytime soon. All JS package managers differ in (somtimes subtle, sometimes no-so-subtle) ways that makes it very hard for us to support all of them equally. And every time we add a new one, we massively increase the surface of stuff we need to support. Adding pnpm, in retrospect, for example, feels like a mistake. We only support a subset of things pnpm does and sometimes badly. Mainly because, while the developer experience of pnpm might be nice, the experience of me as a tool provider is quite frustrating.

Allow be to add a bit of personal perspective: As someone who has been using package managers for quite some time now in various ecosystems, I find the obsession with install times very baffling.

What other things make up the "stellar developer experience"? Mind: I don't want to question your judgement here, you will have your reasons for making the choices you and your team makes, so this is an honest question.

[harish-vts]

I understand the difficulty of supporting the multiplicity of package managers and their lock file formats, especially when combined with module resolution strategies and TypeScript support. it's a maze of complexity for me as a user; I can only imagine what it must involve for the Depfu team.

Install times are an annoyance for us because we have two monorepos at our company that have fairly large package.json files. yarn install from scratch takes 3 minutes on a 2019 Core i9 MacBook Pro. bun install by contrast takes 20 seconds. Thankfully we all have M-series laptops now and it's less frustrating, but the delta in performance remains the same.

Bun's benefits go beyond that. It has first-class support for running TypeScript files. You just give it an entrypoint and it runs your application. No tsconfig.json fiddling, no package.json needed, no ts-jest configuration hell. Backend server? It runs. React frontend? It runs. It Just Works™️. Do you need a relational database? It ships with sqlite. You don't have to roll the dice with a third-party sqlite package that may or may not work depending on your tsconfig and the phase of the moon. Bun shell lets you write shell scripts in a sane language instead of bash or zsh.

Granted, the Node.js developers have taken note of these advancements and included some of these in modern versions of Node.js (like the builtin sqlite package). Bun still has a clear lead in DevEx because of cleaner APIs in its standard library.

[halfbyte]

@harish-vts Thanks for your feedback. I won't close this for now and we'll monitor the situation.

One additional point, though, because I can't help myself:

What would worry me personally (but you can choose to completely ignore this, of course) is that bun is backed by a company that is very selective with what they say about their mission and their goals. It is (similar to deno) a venture fund backed company that will, at some point, need to figure out a business model.

If you look at the stony road that took nodejs to the foundation model it relies on today, I would not feel great about this and I would probably be hesitant to rely on this product very heavily.