May 25, 2023

Hot Takes, Bun, and Zig with Jarred Sumner

51 minutes

Jarred Sumner, Founder and CEO of Oven, is bringing speed to the world of Javascript with his project, Bun. Bun is a next-generation Javascript runtime bundler, transpiler, and NPM package manager that promises lightning-fast speeds. It's already making waves in the industry. The company secured seven million dollars in funding to build hosting for Bun in August 2022.

One of the secrets to Bun's success is its use of the underrated programming language Zig. Jarred explains that Zig allowed him to be incredibly productive and save time with its memory allocator. Another essential feature of Bun is its pre-allocation of almost everything, avoiding the need for dynamically pushing arrays, which can significantly slow down the process. The new version of Bun also has a different runtime than other frameworks like Node and Deno, making it even faster.

In this episode, Jarred talks to Robbie and Chuck about his views on trending Twitter topics, how his company uses benchmarks to optimize Bun's performance, and what he believes has happened to the creativity of the web.

Key Takeaways

[00:30] - Introduction to Jarred Sumner.

[01:17] - A whiskey review: Peerless Small Batch Kentucky Straight Bourbon

[04:42] - Tech hot takes.

[11:15] - Jarred’s new bundler.

[15:36] - Jarred’s reason for using Zig.

[18:52] - Upcoming hosting product Jarred’s team is working on.

[23:09] - What happened to the creativity of the web?

[27:58] - Jarred’s draft tweets.

[30:12] - Jarred’s hobbies besides coding.

[38:51] - Other developers and projects Jarred finds interesting.

Quotes

[16:06] - “Zig is really productive. I tried to use Rust, and I just had a lot of trouble being productive.” ~ Jarred Sumner

[17:55] - “For CPUs, the thing that’s slow usually is not actually the processing, it’s memory.” ~ Jarred Sumner

[22:52] - “I think that we can make the internet and Javascript applications faster, and we can make it easier to deploy, and we can make it better. It going to be a lot of work, but it's going to be really fun.” ~ Jarred Sumner

Links

Jarred Sumner

Jarred Sumner Twitter

Jarred Sumner Github

Jarred Sumner LinkedIn

Why isn’t the internet more fun and weird?

Bun

Oven

Peerless Small Batch Kentucky Straight Bourbon

BEM

GitHub

Ember JS

React

Intercom

Node JS

Deno

Zig

Rust

Google Chrome

Chromium

Vercel

Amazon Management Console

Twitter

Myspace

CNET

Roblox

Stripe

Disney Plus

Marvel

Batman Beyond

Back to the Future

The Boring Company

Netflix

Elysia JS

Wasm

Shepherd JS

Mozilla Firefox

Connect with our hosts

Robbie Wagner

Chuck Carpenter

Ship Shape

Subscribe and stay in touch

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