JavaScript toolkit Bun 1.1 delivers improved performance and debuts on Windows

Despite the small jump to version 1.1, more than 1,7000 commits have been made to the latest version of the "all-in-one toolkit for running, building, testing and debugging JavaScript and TypeScript". Bun 1.1, which the developers say can be used for everything from small scripts to full-stack applications, is said to be even more stable and offer improved compatibility with the popular Node.js JavaScript runtime.

The biggest new feature of the Bun 1.1 JavaScript runtime is support for Windows 10 and 11, which previously supported Linux and macOS. "Bun on Windows consists of 98 percent of our own test suite for Bun on macOS and Linux. This means that everything from the runtime environment, test runner, package manager, bundler - everything works on Windows," the Bun development team explains in a blog post about version 1.1.

The runtime is installed on Windows with the following terminal command:

powershell -c "irm bun.sh/install.ps1 | iex"

Bun comes with a package manager that is compatible with the Node.js package manager npm and, according to the developers, should run much more efficiently on Windows than yarn and npm. API calls should also be faster than with rival Node.js. For example, the file system query "fs.readdir()" should run 58% faster with Bun 1.1 on Windows than a comparable Node.js installation on the Microsoft operating system.

Bun is set to become a drop-in replacement for Node.js in the future, and version 1.1 of the JavaScript runtime brings numerous improvements and fixes to Node.js API support. These include the "node:http2" interface for HTTP/2 requests and the porting of the V8 JavaScript engine's Date parser to Bun, so that API calls to Date.parse() and new Date() now return identical results in Bun 1.1 and Node.js.

An overview of the changes in Bun 1.1 can be found in a detailed blog post by the development team.