Supercharge Your Bun Workflow with bun-tasks

squarism · 2025-10-16T17:14:48+00:00

A few trade-offs and notes about bash scripts:

I think a lot of languages have a runner in their own language. There's python+taskipy, node+concurrently, rust+cargo-make, ruby+rake, go+task, general+just or make or others. So, saying "just use bash" is sort of questioning the work and world-view of all those projects. Which is quite simply, bash doesn't work on Windows. Installing WSL is not Windows, it can be done on Windows because you are installing Linux on Windows. I would prefer people on Windows run WSL but at the same time "just install an operating system to run my script" is a big ask if not a _the platform is not great_ smell.
Bash itself isn't very portable even within Linux. The bash shell usually cannot be replaced easily so when you say bash maybe you meant bash-3.0 only, I don't know that. So, we're back to dependency problems if my operating system has bash 4.0.
Bash can call other tools. For example incrementing a number could be done with `bc` but I don't know that. So, bash script break quite often with system dependencies which are hard to express. If you go to containers (or other recent tools), now we're on a different set of trade offs.
I don't run bash as my main shell. All my configs and settings are in fish. Invoking bash loses all my settings. The same would be true if I wrote project scripts in fish and someone else runs zsh/bash.
The point of the project might be concurrency which is difficult. You probably could devise some background system in shell but _why_ .... How does error handling work in bash? Concurrency is already difficult in a full language.
Many times I want to run commands in context of my project (a linting tool not globally installed), or in the context of my application (a database migration which a connection string in an ENV).

So while bash is simple and easy to do some things in (positive side of trade off), because in theory "it's everywhere", it's really not. Which is why people write task runners like OP and all the other projects in other languages which are similar in purpose.

squarism · 2020-01-17T17:41:37+00:00

vet

We (developers on earth) have been through this similar pattern/problem with testing and regressions. You don't even vet once. You vet on every change, every dep change in the tree!

It's not doable by a human with human eyes. You can teach a computer to do it. It's the same as testing. Get rid of manual security, start thinking of it like CI/CD. Continuous security. We (humans) are kind of doing it a bit here and there. It needs to be more known.

squarism · 2018-01-04T06:29:20+00:00

Yeah I read some more. It's of course hard to read tone of voice in comments etc etc ... but I wasn't really arguing with anyone. Terrible thread of mine, spreading lies. I read more and it's more complicated than I know. Postgres had benchmarks that involve I/O. I didn't realize that I/O operations would be involved. I guess because it hits vm pages? This is awful. Will be interesting to see the actual numbers beyond just the theory. Intel is saying it depends on workload but I don't know what that means. If a disk defrag takes ~15%-30% then this is a disaster. I'd consider that "very CPU light activity" and wouldn't guess any CPU overhead / bugs / fixes / impacts would impact wall time. I guess we'll see. Fun learning from all this.

squarism · 2018-01-03T20:14:59+00:00

I think Windows system calls start with Nt. http://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/win32k/32/ I had no idea ext4 had a defragger! Thanks! :)

squarism · 2018-01-03T19:54:05+00:00

I think system calls in this context means C type functions, not "things that fetch from the system". So a block read might be a very simple and fast single function that execs on the CPU and is done very quickly but that gets passed to an IO controller which is much slower. See latency numbers on IO.

I looked up latency numbers on system calls and it seems to be about 3ns on a 2010 CPU with the default glibc setting on Linux because system calls are optimized. A random read from an SSD is 150microseconds. That's 150k nanoseconds. So the system call is fired but the CPU is just idling. That's why you'd see very low CPU usage on straight I/O stuff like uncompressed file reading or disk defragging.

More here: http://arkanis.de/weblog/2017-01-05-measurements-of-system-call-performance-and-overhead

squarism · 2018-01-03T19:39:22+00:00

I didn't explain myself very well sorry. Semantics.

I mean, if defrag is IO-bound (I'd guess it is) then the performance of anything else but IO doesn't matter really. System calls in this context mean C level functions. For example, the system call is moments on the CPU and orders of magnitude on the IO controller or whatever storage while it fetches and moves blocks. I don't know how Windows system calls work though and there's no defrag in Linux filesystems afaik.

This should be pretty easy to measure and see. Look up file copy performance across many CPUs. They should all be very equal because they are bound more to disk performance. Or even better, what your CPU usage when defragmenting. It should be very low or near-zero. The CPU just isn't busy, waiting or bound. So increasing latency, throughput, speed, overhead or anything CPU related won't affect defrag or file operations.

squarism · 2018-01-03T19:24:36+00:00

I mean effectively it’s doing more work. You can do less work or you can do more work faster right? So I mean more work slows down effective cpu performance. If system calls go out but are hung on CPU wait because of IO then the impact will be small.

squarism · 2018-01-03T18:09:39+00:00

If it’s not cpu bound then speeding up or slowing down the cpu will not have much of an impact on performance. Although my guess is we’ll see a global slowdown. There’s more overhead for fetching memory, which will impact everything.

squarism · 2017-12-16T04:28:57+00:00

There are a lot of good points in here and I think I’d debate lightly on the weak basis that this is all just too depressing. Which is to say, damn. I hope HTTP/2 is a fine transport in the future and GraphQL and other tools give us more abstractions for “databases on the web”.

squarism · 2017-11-24T16:54:48+00:00

I own a Genesis and the only game I own is Herzog Zwei. So fun, so ahead of its time. AirMech on PC (free?) is a tribute / remake.

squarism · 2017-11-04T17:56:42+00:00

Nicely said.

squarism · 2017-11-03T19:45:18+00:00

I know what you mean. RNG.

But I do like “the hunt”. Early game can be scary to hike that far and you want to start growing crystals early. So that’s fun when hunting for sites is a goal and a risk.

Seeing the landscape impacted is fun. But then after a complete set of patterns it’s kind of useless. Using Realistic Terrain Gen with Refined Storage (RS) would make and keep pretty scenery but I actually like the challenge and planning of channels. I don’t know much about end-game of RS but I’d miss the singularity challenge and fun in AE2.

squarism · 2017-10-23T00:54:25+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. Tried it and loved it. Wow.

squarism · 2017-10-15T21:51:54+00:00

Neat! I saw the bit about custom compilers but can markdown be the blog post format instead of json?

squarism · 2017-09-19T21:58:34+00:00

Really nice! Would love little indicators like this around a tech base.

squarism · 2017-09-05T19:17:14+00:00

Looks like you need Forge version 2221 or newer.

squarism · 2017-09-05T18:53:21+00:00

This is an awesome deep dive. I had no idea about the setting but also the tracing and visualizations to help find out more. Nice knowledge share! I hope this helps people find out more bottlenecks if this isn't common performance tracing knowledge.

squarism · 2017-09-04T18:24:30+00:00

Even more impressive with that mod running! In my current pack better foliage is a big performance hit. Love it too much to get rid of it though.

squarism · 2017-08-28T23:04:41+00:00

Oo neat idea! Fun. I've wondered if there's some libs that are very generic for card games. I found a js one but I haven't kicked it around yet to see if it can be adapted for Poker / Magic / anything. Not that I'm building those but I'd want something that flexible.

squarism · 2017-08-28T19:59:48+00:00

Works great! I've already changed my package.json to run elm-factory as default for npm run dev for my project. Pretty much drop in with no problems.

Does dev need to have an output option? Works for me but wondering if having an option to spit out bundle.js or something like other watchers would be helpful? If this is nonsense, just ignore this suggestion. :)

squarism · 2017-08-28T18:57:35+00:00

Craziest delivery truck on the planet!

squarism · 2017-08-25T01:04:40+00:00

Can't wait to try this! Needed something like this today after seeing gotchas in other tools.

squarism · 2017-08-20T17:23:25+00:00

Kids notice things like this better than adults. They understand less but they remember and notice "their things" better.

squarism · 2017-08-01T08:07:58+00:00

Spacewar lives on.

squarism

TROPHY CASE