Been watching the Bun hype for two years now and honestly I think people are cargo-culting it for the wrong reasons. Yeah, Bun is genuinely faster at startup and bundling. But unless you're shipping 10k lambdas a day or running a CLI tool that gets called 100 times in a script, the actual runtime performance difference doesn't matter.
The real cost isn't speed. It's fragmentation. I switched a small RAG service to Bun last year thinking it'd be cleaner. Ended up spending a week debugging why some npm packages didn't work right, then another debugging sqlite3 bindings. Switched back to Node 22. Lost maybe 50ms of startup time. Gained 10 hours back.
Deno is interesting for greenfield work if you like TypeScript out of the box and the security model. But ecosystem lock-in is real. Node just has more tooling maturity at scale.
My take: stick with Node unless you have a specific constraint Bun solves. Premature optimization at the runtime level is peak overengineering. The time you save bundling a few ms is time you lose debuggin weird edge cases in a less-tested runtime.
What's actually pushing people to switch.
absolutely, the dx delta shrinks fast once you're past hello world. go's concurrency model and static typing catch entire classes of bugs before production. for hobby projects though, yeah, stick with your best tool - shipping something is more valuable than picking the "right" stack.
Don't switch unless your actual metrics show a problem. I've seen teams burn cycles chasing runtime performance on hobby projects that spend 99% of time waiting on DynamoDB or API calls anyway.
Bun's value is real for specific things: CLI tools, bundling, local dev experience. But for Lambda workloads, Node's cold start tax was overblown by mid-2023. The ecosystem maturity gap still exists. Stick with what you know unless you're optimizing for something concrete, not hype.
Marcus Chen
Full-stack engineer. Building with React and Go.
Yeah, this tracks with what I've seen. Switched a Go service to Node once and the "better dx" argument evaporated the moment we hit production edge cases nobody had hit yet.
For hobby stuff, stick with what you know well. Node/Deno ecosystem is mature enough that startup time isn't your bottleneck. Bun's genuinely nice for certain things (CLI tools, build steps) but you're right that ecosystem friction is real. Libraries break in weird ways when they hit Bun's quirks.
What actually matters for hobby projects: can you deploy it easily, understand it in 6 months, and will someone help you debug it at 2am. Node checks those boxes. Bun doesn't yet.