stiegi

stiegi

As the title suggests, I’d like to hear your opinion of the idea to replace esbuild with bun.js, since it recently received its 1.0 release. The release trailer can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThyMiimsAA0, more infos about bun you can find here: https://bun.sh/

For those who haven’t heard of it: bun is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for nodeJS and Deno. It as also a package manager so it replaces npm etc, and it comes with its own test suite. Written in Zik (https://ziglang.org/), it seems much faster than node and deno.

Now, I know that Phoenix switched to esbuild quite recently, however bun seems to outperform esbuild, and can also be used as a test framework and even as a runtime, in case you need some service written in JS. So, as it looks like, it would be everything esbuild is (a bundler) but faster, and more. There’s already support for many frameworks, and I think it would be great if you could spin up a Phoenix app, and combine it for example with a single page application of your choice out of the box.

What is your opinion about this? Would you prefer to stick with esbuild for now, or do you think it would make sense to switch again?

Showing Posts 1 to 10

wanton7

wanton7

I also read it supports TypeScript out of the box.

wanton7

wanton7

This was at Bun’s GitHub repo. So it’s not possible to replace esbuild now because Bun doesn’t have Windows support.

Windows users — Bun does not currently provide a native Windows build. We’re working on this; progress can be tracked at this issue. In the meantime, use one of the installation methods below for Windows Subsystem for Linux.

stiegi

stiegi OP

Yes I forgot about Typescript support and the Windows issue. Well, that will be solved at some point, and I also would not suggest you replace esbuild right with an 1.0 version anyway but wait a bit until first production experience reports are in. But given that windows support is there, and we can see in many places reports like “we switched from node to bun and it is awesome”, would you like to have the switch to bun then?

wanton7

wanton7

I’ve only used Phoenix LiveView for very small projects but sure I would be fine with that change.

LostKobrakai

LostKobrakai

Esbuild was chosen to lessen the node/npm related churn on the phoenix team. I personally wouldn’t see a switch to bun being helpful to that goal.

I’d love to see someone build a wrapper for downloading bun like the esbuild wrapper does it though.

11
Post #5
belaustegui

belaustegui

This has been on my mind since Bun released version 1.0. I’ve published a package today to integrate Bun with Elixir which is heavily based on the Esbuild package.

13
Post #6
zstzlmk

zstzlmk

Thank you, this is awesome.

belaustegui

belaustegui

Thank you! I hope that you find it useful :heart:

arcanemachine

arcanemachine

Doesn’t ESBuild support TS out of the box? I haven’t made any changes but I can automagically import my TS files as needed.

polypush135

polypush135

Well at least you are not asking for webpack :laughing:

I’ve pushed this rock before. I have in here everyday in the past complained how painful webpack was and that we should push to esbuild. I guess we have come full circle again.

I didn’t post this as a retort for asking to use bun.js but rather to say. It would look like every so many years that our asset tools evolve and we end up wanting to migrate. This clearly requires some effort on someones part and we should not just expect the core team to just want to pick up a new tool every few years.

Phoenix already does a good job at abstracting that pipeline for the most part.

The only thing I think that really keeps us coupled to this workflow is the trigger for watching a file so that it gets recompiled while running a dev server. “PhoenixLiveReload”

It would be nice to see phoenix in the future be completely static asset management agnostic and not come pre baked with any 3rd party lib for that.

This has been one of the biggest issues when working on any legacy app. The Node js libs that need to be managed in said tool cry because they are too out of date and no longer compatible.

Where Next? Top

Trending in Discussions Top

cblavier
Hey there, It’s been more than a year since we started using LiveView as our main UI library and building a whole library of UI componen...
New
mudasobwa
I am happy to introduce the very α version of the new programming language compiled to BEAM. Welcome Cure. It has literally three kille...
New
mhanberg
Hi everyone! The first release candidate for the Expert language server project is now available! We’ve published a press release detai...
New
budgie
A little off-topic, but I feel like people here have a good head on their shoulders. I used to be quite good at making software. Was luc...
New
axelson
Hi there! :wave: @frigidcode and I (but mostly him) have been running an Elixir Book club, we’re almost done with Designing Elixir Syste...
New
achempion
I’ve been using Emacs as my main code editor for more than a two years. It’s a custom build version although I’ve tried doom emacs and sp...
New
budgie
I love Elixir. It’s one of 2 programming languages I’ve ever fallen in love with. But I don’t use it anymore. Serverless was the promis...
New

Other Trending Topics Top

GenericJam
Edit: 2026 May 15 - This post is archived. Mob is alive!! Main docs: mob v0.7.11 — Documentation A bit of explanation for the slightly c...
New
JesseHerrick
Hey, I’m Jesse and I’m the main contributor behind Dexter, a full-featured, lightning-fast Elixir LSP optimized for large codebases. It s...
New
garrison
Hobbes is a low-level distributed database for the Elixir programming language. Hobbes provides a simple, safe, and scalable storage lay...
New
mcass19
ExRatatui lets you cook up rich terminal UIs in Elixir, powered by Rust’s ratatui via Rustler NIFs. Build interactive terminal applicatio...
New
georgeguimaraes
Just published claude-code-elixir, a plugin marketplace for Claude Code with Elixir support. These are the plugins I’ve been using for my...
New
Dmk
Xamal is a deployment tool for Elixir apps that deploys native releases to bare metal servers over SSH. It’s a port of GitHub - basecamp/...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement

Options

Thread Display Mode




Thread Preview

Skip Thread Previews