r/bun

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.

I am coming from npm/pnpm world and I could do the following and have my local cli app available anywhere:

"pnpm add -g ."
"npm link ."

I've tried running:

bun add -g .
bun add -g
bun link -g

but nothing works!

👋 Today I'm launching Mochi - a performance-focused metaframework for Svelte and an alternative to SvelteKit built on Bun. Mochi is built on an islands architecture and allows you to keep most components as performant server-side rendered code and hydrate just the components you need. This means smaller JavaScript bundles and faster performance for your users.

Try it out with bun create mochi@latest or go to https://mochi.fast to check out the docs.

When i try running bun dev, it throws the following error

`You are using Node.js 20.2.0. Vite requires Node.js version 20.19+ or 22.12+. Please upgrade your Node.js version.`

despite having `+ node@24.18.0` when I ran bun i.

Any help?

(I'm using bun, react, vite and bootstrap)

I’m one of the people building Appaloft, an open-source deployment control plane.

We wrote up how we’re using Bun in the public Appaloft repo. The most interesting part for us was not raw speed, but the release shape Bun made possible:

- TypeScript release scripts

- bun build --compile for the CLI/server

- embedded Web console and docs assets via file imports

- embedded PGlite runtime assets for the local-first path

- separate filesystem assets in Docker

- explicit macOS/Linux/Windows release targets

The part that surprised me: --compile gives you a binary, but it does not design your runtime asset boundary. We still had to decide how /docs works, how SPA fallback differs from docs routing, how operators override embedded assets, and why Docker wants a different asset strategy than a binary archive.

Blog post:

https://www.appaloft.com/blog/we-built-appaloft-with-bun/

Curious how other Bun users are handling compiled CLIs, embedded static assets, and multi-target releases.