For those of us forced to be in the JS ecosystem, finally having a runtime that Just Works has been great.
Bun has replaced a massive number of tools and dependencies from our stack and really counteracted the tooling explosion that we were forced into with node.
In our case, it's not so much being forced to use Bun, but rather that Bun is in real terms infinitely more convenient than lower-level languages. Firstly, even the most novice of novices tend to have a passing familiarity with JS/TS, whereas this is not true for C/Zig/Rust/etc, so it's easier for people to contribute to our projects. Bun also provides so many things for free, statically, and cross platform. You want a TCP server? A websocket server? SQLite database? You want to include static assets? You want to generate static assets at compile time? Etc? Bun provides it.
Attempting to replicate even a modicum of this in lower-level languages can be a real struggle. Rust is definitively the least-worst in this respect because there's been a concerted effort by the community to provide stable packages that do most things. But Rust is a complicated and unapproachable language. Using other low-level languages like C/Zig, and you immediately run into issues of libraries and static linking. And even if you find a library, its documentation is either lacklustre or outright missing (looking at you libuv and libxev respectively).
The amount of manual setup and third-party builds-system finagling just to: 1) run a TCP server; 2) fetch data over HTTP; 3) do both of these using a single event loop (no separate threads); 4) use SQLite for storage; and 5) have all this produce a single self-contained executable. Yet I cannot understate how trivial this is with Bun.
