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bun install or pnpm workspaces for three devs shipping to node 22 Bun
Starting a new repo. Three engineers, maybe 8 packages to begin with, deploying to Node 22 on Lambda. Runtime is Node, that part is settled - the question is only what installs the dependencies and runs the scripts.
Bun install is dramatically faster in the benchmarks I ran myself (roughly 18s vs 41s cold, same tree). But I have never run it as the primary installer on something that has to be reliable for a year, and I do not have anyone to page when it goes sideways.
What actually breaks when the installer and the runtime are different, and is the speed difference worth anything once CI caches are warm?
@whetstone_wu · 4mo ago · 2 replies
You are optimising a number that CI is about to make irrelevant. With a warm store cache our install step is 6 seconds on either tool. Your 23 second delta shows up on a cold cache, which happens a few times a week, and on a fresh clone, which happens a few times a year.
Meanwhile the thing that actually costs your three-person team time is
tscand the test suite. If install is your bottleneck you have a very unusual repo.Use bun as a script runner if you like it -
bun run xis snappier than npm's - while keeping pnpm as the installer. That combination is common and gets you most of the ergonomic win with none of the ecosystem risk.Reply
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@two_calendars · 4mo ago
Seconding the split. We also use
bunfor one-off scripts because it runs TypeScript directly with no build step, which deleted a whole tsx dependency and a bunch of config. That is a real quality of life gain that carries no risk, because those scripts do not ship.Reply
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