Feature Request: Embedding Bun within other native applications (like a Rust program)

[alshdavid]

What is the problem this feature would solve?

Many native projects would like to be able to embed a JavaScript runtime that can leverage the Nodejs ecosystem and Nodejs standard library.

• AWS Lambda
• Supabase
• Bundlers (Parcel, Rspack, etc)
• Mongo
• Applications that want to use JavaScript for plugins (like Lapce)
• etc

What is the feature you are proposing to solve the problem?

Offer a dynamic C library (or a Rust crate) that allows Bun to be embedded within another native application

What alternatives have you considered?

• Nodejs Embedding API
  • Very difficult to use, many projects try to use this and drop it
• Deno
  • Embedding Deno is reasonably easy to get started with however using the Nodejs standard library is not easy. Deno requires you to fork the Deno CLI to extract support for the Nodejs API. Additionally, due to differences between Deno and Nodejs, certain features (like workspaces support) do not work as expected.

[0xF6]

+1 from my side cases: adding bun as a scripting provider to game engines

[DoctorGester]

@0xF6 I was looking for that as well.

Basically what I think Bun could do there:

1. Offer an option to bun build --compile into a shared library instead of an exe, this shouldn't be too complicated.
2. Extend bun ffi to also work backwards, i.e. define exported C ABI functions from javascript.

[bayasdev]

+1