Stop "Shopping" for Libraries - The Battery-Included Runtime

Explore the revolutionary "Compressed Layers" architecture in this 18-minute conference talk by Jarred Sumner, creator of Bun, delivered at JSNation US. Discover why traditional JavaScript tooling remains fundamentally slow and how Bun's engineering philosophy aims to replace the fragmented Node.js ecosystem with a single, high-performance toolkit. Learn about the productivity-killing practice of "shopping for libraries" and understand how moving essential I/O, SQL clients, and utilities directly into the runtime using native code and SIMD optimizations can achieve performance improvements from 10x to 6000x faster. Examine the technical implementation of deferred task queues, batching syscalls, and native implementations of shell operations, WebSockets, and hashing functions. Understand why the runtime includes built-in support for Postgres, MySQL, and Redis databases, and how this "battery-included" philosophy compares to frameworks like Ruby on Rails. Gain insights into the hardware/software gap that prevents computers from feeling faster despite technological advances, and explore real-world production adoption examples from companies like MidJourney, Vercel, and DataDog. The talk also covers Node.js drop-in compatibility, instant npm installations, lockfile handling, and concludes with observations about AI-generated code's impact on the future of JavaScript runtimes, plus practical guidance on installing and running Bun.