Ran real PHP applications as TypeScript on Bun 1.3.14; migration from Node was mostly a non-event
I’ve been transpiling PHP applications to TypeScript and running the output on Bun, and I’ve now got real apps executing end to end. Sharing some notes in case they’re useful to anyone moving a Node-targeted codebase over.
Coming from Node 22, the runtime side was almost boring, most of the transpiled output just ran on Bun directly, no changes needed.
The one real snag was native code. A few C bindings (PCRE, LibXML) that worked fine on Node 22 didn’t load on Bun 1.3.14. That’s understandable: native addons are compiled against a specific runtime’s ABI/internals, so a binding built for one runtime won’t necessarily load on another. Instead of maintaining runtime-specific builds, I compiled the C bindings to WebAssembly. They’re now version-independent; no ABI coupling, so the same WASM artifact behaves the same regardless of the runtime underneath.
The thing I’m still figuring out: I’d been using Node’s cluster mode to mirror PHP-FPM’s process model (a master plus a pool of workers), and I’m still investigating how that holds up under Bun. If anyone here has run node:cluster workloads on Bun, especially anything resembling a prefork worker pool, I’d like to hear how it went and where the edges are.