Bun 1.1 Released: Windows Support and the Bun Shell

What happened

Bun 1.1 was released on April 1, 2024, according to the official announcement on the Bun blog. The team described it as a huge update, with over 1,700 commits since Bun 1.0, focused on making Bun more stable and more compatible with Node.js while fixing over a thousand bugs and adding many new features and APIs.

Windows support

The marquee feature was native Windows support. Bun can now run on Windows 10 and later, and the team said Bun on Windows passes 98% of its own test suite for macOS and Linux, meaning the runtime, test runner, package manager and bundler all work. To make bun run fast on Windows, the team engineered a new .bunx cross-filesystem symlink file format, and reported that bun install runs 18x faster than yarn and 30x faster than npm when installing a Vite React app on Windows.

The Bun Shell

Bun 1.1 introduced the Bun Shell, a cross-platform shell, like bash but also on Windows, implemented as a lexer, parser and interpreter for a bash-like language along with core utilities such as ls, rm and cat. It can be run from JavaScript and TypeScript via the Bun.$ API, making it easy to pass arguments, buffers and pipes between the shell and JavaScript, with variables escaped to prevent command injection.

New APIs and Node.js compatibility

The release added built-in APIs including Bun.Glob for glob matching, Bun.Semver for parsing and sorting semver strings, and a very fast stringWidth function. On the Node.js compatibility front, Bun 1.1 added the node:http2 client, ported the Date parser from V8 for consistent Date.parse behaviour, added a recursive option to fs.readdir, and enabled IPC messaging between Bun and Node.js processes. The built-in WebSocket client was also marked stable after passing the Autobahn conformance suite.

Why it mattered

By bringing Bun to Windows, version 1.1 opened the fast all-in-one toolkit to a whole new group of developers who previously needed the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Combined with the Bun Shell and a large batch of Node.js compatibility fixes, Bun 1.1 made the runtime meaningfully more practical for everyday, cross-platform development.

Related on Skillo

See also: Bun 1.0 and the all-in-one toolkit, Deno 2's Node and npm compatibility.

Sources

• Bun 1.1 (official Bun blog)

Published date reflects the original event date (2024-04-01). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.