Harish Narnaware's team blog

Difference between NPM and BUN

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Harish Narnaware
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2 min read

Bun is a new JavaScript runtime built from scratch to serve the modern JavaScript ecosystem. It has three major design goals:

  • Speed. Bun starts fast and runs fast. It extends JavaScriptCore, the performance-minded JS engine built for Safari. As computing moves to the edge, this is critical.

  • Elegant APIs. Bun provides a minimal set of highly-optimimized APIs for performing common tasks, like starting an HTTP server and writing files.

  • Cohesive DX. Bun is a complete toolkit for building JavaScript apps, including a package manager, test runner, and bundler.

Speed difference while installing packages

In this test i copied remix template

bun create remix

bun installation package test

The installation of packages is done 10.36 seconds

npm test

It takes 2 minute to install all packages

Lets take another test.

vite app

I created vite app with npm

npm create vite@latest

bun package installer

bun takes 2.53 second

Npm package installer test

npm takes 19 second

lets take test of react app installation. The command bun create react app1

give error. so i used this command

npm create-react-app my-app

with bun

bun takes 6.29 seconds

npm installed in 10 seconds

Speed test between both

this is the code for print numbers

console.time('test');

for (let i = 0; i < 10000; i++) console.log(i)

console.timeEnd("test");

bun test

node test

bun is much faster

Node

Advantages:

  • Extremely popular → many community projects, resources, job offers, etc.

  • Overall, it is pretty nice and easy to use

Disadvantages:

  • Runs only JavaScript – TypeScript projects require additional tooling such as ts-node or swc-node

  • Vendored-by-default node_modules take up a lot of space and don’t scale with the numbers of projects

  • API not compatible with browser API.

Bun

Bun has three main goals:

  • Execute JavaScript as fast as possible

  • Provide great, complete, and fast tooling (bundler, package manager, etc.)

  • Be a drop-in replacement for all existing Node projects.

  • bun install (no bun.lockb) → 21 s

  • bun install (with bun.lockb) → 6.77 s

Summary

In conclusion, Node.js is currently the most popular choice for running JavaScript on the server, and it has a huge community and many resources available.

Bun, while still in early development, aims to provide the fastest possible JavaScript execution and a complete set of tools, making it a compelling option for those seeking performance.