February 8, 2026
Bash vs Bun smackdown
Bun v1.3.9
Bun adds 'do it all at once' buttons — comments explode over bash vs Bun
TLDR: Bun v1.3.9 lets developers run multiple tasks together or in order with clear labels, plus fixes some network and testing quirks. Comments split between “this saves time” and “just use bash,” while others argue for smarter dependency-based runners and poke fun about Anthropic needing Bun at all.
Bun v1.3.9 hands developers a big shiny “run many things at once” button. With simple flags, you can kick off builds and tests together or in order, with rainbow labels so you know who’s talking. There are extras: smarter handling of shared scripts across multiple projects, an auto-cleanup for test doubles (no more manual resets), a fix for a quirky “TCP to HTTP/2” handoff used by some servers, and the NO_PROXY setting finally works even when you set a proxy yourself. Check out Bun.
But the comments? Online chaos. One camp cheers the convenience: “Nice, fewer glue scripts.” Another camp rolls its eyes: “Why not just bash?” User johnfn truly typifies the minimalist crowd. Then spankalee brings the heat: parallel vs sequential is the wrong mental model—describe dependencies, let the tool figure out order. That sparked a mini-philosophy war: buttons vs brains.
Even naming got spicy. giorgioz asked if English prefers “Parallel & Sequential” or “Parallel & Series,” after shipping React components with those names—cue grammar nerds and code poets dueling. Meanwhile rcarmo just wants the web socket gremlins gone, hoping this release fixes a Node-RED blocker. And dude250711 drops the meme-bomb: why does Anthropic need Bun at all—can’t Claude whip up something better? The crowd laughed and kept arguing.
Key Points
- •Bun v1.3.9 adds concurrent and sequential package.json script execution with labeled output, integrated with --filter and --workspaces.
- •Default failure behavior stops remaining scripts; --no-exit-on-error allows all scripts to finish.
- •Pre/post scripts are grouped and executed in correct dependency order; bun --filter respects dependency order, while --parallel/--sequential do not.
- •Fixes the net.Server → Http2SecureServer connection upgrade pattern used by libraries such as http2-wrapper and crawlee.
- •bun:test mock() and spyOn() implement Symbol.dispose for auto-restoring with using, and NO_PROXY is now honored even with explicit proxy options for fetch() and WebSocket().