Why Bunmaska

Everyone’s “lighter Electron” pitch is “we made the binary smaller.” Cute. Anyone can gzip a binary. Here is the thing Electron structurally cannot do, and it’s the reason Bunmaska exists.

The runtime is Bun, and it shows

Your main process runs on Bun, not Node - and that’s not a detail:

• Millisecond startup. Bun boots several times faster than Node, and JavaScriptCore (the engine behind Safari) is tuned for exactly that - fast start, lean memory. Your app window appears before Electron has finished unpacking itself.
• TypeScript is the native language. bunmaska run src/main.ts executes your TS directly - no transpile step, no build config, no ts-node tax.
• The toolchain collapses to one binary. Package manager, bundler, test runner and bun build --compile all ship inside Bun - it’s how the CLI packages your whole app into a single executable with no electron-builder in sight.
• bun:ffi is the moat-maker. The same FFI that makes native modules buildless (next section) is a first-class, JIT-optimized part of the runtime - not an addon system bolted on later.

A native module is just a .ts file

Want to talk to a USB serial port, the system keychain, IOKit, a custom sensor - anything the OS exposes? In Electron that means node-gyp, N-API, electron-rebuild, and a per-arch prebuild matrix that detonates every time you bump Electron.

In Bunmaska, a native module is a TypeScript file that dlopens the operating system and calls it directly. No compiler. No binding.gyp. No recompile when you upgrade. It’s literally how Bunmaska itself is built - about thirty system libraries wired with zero compiled native code.

Nothing to rebuild, because there was never anything to build.

The engine is a choice, not a tax

Electron has one engine story: a private Chromium in every app, re-shipped with every update. Bunmaska gives you three, all WebKit, all outside your update pipeline:

• Default - the system’s WebKit (macOS WKWebView, Linux WebKitGTK). Nothing extra to download; the OS patches the browser engine for you, while you sleep.
• Pinned - an exact, signature-verified WebKit build from the shared engine store, when byte-for-byte rendering consistency matters. Installed once, shared across every app that pins it - “tested == shipped” without Electron’s per-app copy.
• Windows - our own from-source WinCairo build (Windows ships no WebKit). Still WebKit, never Chromium, and loaded from the same store instead of living inside your bundle.

Whichever you pick, the result is the same: your app update is your code, not a browser.

• ~3× smaller installed and ~7-10× smaller to download than the Electron equivalent.
• Updates are tiny - there’s no 150 MB Chromium to re-ship every release.
• Engine security updates arrive with the OS or the engine store - never as a rebuild of your app.

Supply-chain minimalism

Zero runtime dependencies. Zero compiled native code. No postinstall build scripts. No per-arch prebuilt addons to vet. Your runtime SBOM is “Bun + your code.” For anyone who’s had to fill out a vendor security review, that sentence is worth a lot.

And the honest part

It’s alpha, it runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows x64 (a few APIs differ per platform), and it covers ~70-80% of Electron’s surface. We’re not going to pretend otherwise - that’s a whole page of trade-offs, published on purpose. If you need Windows ARM64, BrowserView, or the last 20% of the API, Bunmaska isn’t there yet.

If you want a desktop app that’s small, fast, and doesn’t ship a browser it didn’t need to - that’s the entire point.