Bun-powered MMORPG: A Brief Testimonial

[zimmed]

As we've finally announced a closed beta release of HeroBound, I wanted to take some time to give credit where credit is due: Bun was absolutely instrumental in being able to rapidly develop such an ambitious project and still maintain competitive performance.

I originally came across Bun about a year ago when I began this project and was reading through some discussions on the uNetworking/uWebSockets repository, a library which I had already been using for a few years. When I found out that a node alternative existed that already used µws out of the box, I was VERY interested, and so I decided to check it out.

What I discovered is that Bun is far from a Nodejs replacement. Not only is it better than node in almost every way, it also includes nearly every feature needed to manage an entire project. I ditched Nextjs, rollup, and many other libraries, because almost all of the functionality I needed from them came standard in Bun. Moreover, the addition of Bun to my project led me to Zig, and I was able to drastically increase the performance of several WASM modules by reimplementing them in Zig. One quite significant example is the NBA* pathfinder that I ported to Zig. Not only was running this pathfinder 900x faster on the client than using the 3D renderer's pre-baked navigation mesh, but it was so fast on the server that there was no need to offload pathfinding to the client! The average time for generating a 64-tile path in the Bun server is <10ns. At a 10Hz tick rate, pathfinding is a completely negligible operation even with thousands of active players.

In the last year there have been many frustrations with poorly-implemented APIs (cough babylonjs cough cough), but Bun was definitely not one of them.† And now, with an infrastructure that easily supports tens of thousands of active players on a single instance, while being able to share domain code directly between the client and server, it can be said that Bun has played no small part in turning a dream into a reality.

_{† Well, that's actually not entirely true. I had to throw out several libraries I had written to increase the performance of operations in Nodejs, because the same operations in Bun were impossibly fast. I mean, come on, did you REALLY have to make JSON stringify and parse SO much more performant than the binary serialization module that took a month to build? And why is Math.random FASTER than a single TypedArray lookup? Seriously, you guys need to relax. xD}

All of this to say, I cannot recommend Bun enough. Bun is what Node should have been if the people contributing to it knew what they were doing.

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Also, if anyone is interested, we're looking for play testers for the closed beta in November: https://heroboundgame.com/#signup