Pretty sure I've been annoying friends in the JS space by harping on this topic for years, but I think people start listening a little more when someone like Sunil, who publicly iterates quickly in spite of all the current obstacles in the ecosystem, says it. 100% this
Why is bun/biome/turbopack/<devtool with a focus on perf> _such_ a big deal?
Why does a few seconds matter so much?
As a product engineer, iteration speed is EVERYTHING. It literally multiplies runway. Do you see it?
ime, In every non trivial project for the past 10 years, here's what's taken time to land code in CI (besides writing it):
- install deps
- build code
- lint codebase
- typecheck
- run tests
Mentally imagine one version of this takes 2 minutes, and other takes 20.
Someone drops a review on your PR ("NIT", they say. Hmph.) So you commit it and wait again. Do you see the problem?
Sure, you can throw caches at it, but beyond a point even loading/saving those take time (and money!!). We'd assumed our tools are as fast as they can get, so when product engineers, whose everyday work (read: do the above 10s of times from 9-5) come across a tool that reclaims their time, they associate it with FREEDOM. Do you see it? They can ship faster, spend more time with their family, get professional accolades, and focus on the things that help them ship.
I'm not joking about this impact even a little. It helps them spend more time with their family. This isn't tech navel gazing. I'm speaking from experience.
So bun comes along (for 1,2,5). Turbopack tries to be more holistic and makes a fast tool but also great caching. The bloomberg gang are going to solve 4. Biome might solve 3. And the impact is theoretically for _millions of developers_ across the world, since they're all working on conventions/standards. A PR that would take hours to land now takes minutes. Do you see it?
It's a big deal.