The Holepunch team has introduced Bare, a groundbreaking minimal JavaScript runtime designed for both desktop and mobile. Built to be fast, modular, and efficient, Bare revisits the original vision of Node.js by embracing modularity and universal compatibility.
Bare: Simplicity is Strength
The Holepunch team has launched something that we are immensely proud of — an elegant innovation that we believe will be a game-changer for developers. Bare is a stripped-down, minimal JavaScript runtime, with all the tenacity of a burly bear. As CEO Mathias Buus Madsen observed “You just don’t see something in the tech world as essentially fundamental as Bare very often.”
Bare is a small and modular JavaScript runtime for desktop and mobile. Like Node.js, it provides an asynchronous, event-driven architecture for writing applications in the lingua franca of modern software.
Unlike Node.js, it makes embedding and cross-device support core use cases, aiming to run just as well on your phone as on your laptop. The result is a runtime ideal for networked, peer-to-peer applications that can run on a wide selection of hardware.
We see Bare as a sort of homecoming to the original vision of Node.js — providing a fresh new take on JavaScript runtime fundamentals with a focus on modularity, universality, and scalability. In a perfectly rational world, Bare *should* have been created and launched long ago, but corporate interests and capital drove Node.js inevitably toward a centralized schema.
What Can You Build with Bare?
Peer-to-Peer Applications
Bare’s minimal footprint and modular architecture make it the perfect foundation for P2P applications. By leveraging the Holepunch stack, developers can seamlessly embed modules to build live data streaming, real-time communication, file sharing applications, and much more. Bare’s flexibility ensures that P2P solutions remain lightweight, efficient, and scalable.
Self-contained, Cross-platform apps
With Bare, you can write secure modules once and reuse them across both mobile and desktop environments. Whether it’s private, encrypted push notifications running in low-memory settings or re-encoding videos on the fly, Bare’s ecosystem offers an ever-expanding array of cross-platform modules. This makes app development both efficient and versatile, allowing you to create robust applications without redundant code.
Bare offers developers the most bang for their buck, as it can interface with existing runtimes, such as V8, through LibJS. This integration offers powerful abstractions, enabling you to achieve native performance while maintaining the flexibility of JavaScript. Bare’s native fastcalls ensure that layers seamlessly work together, giving you the best of both worlds as a native and JavaScript developer.
“We built Bare to support multiple JavaScript engines—V8, JavaScriptCore, QuickJS—so it can run anywhere from computers to phones to embedded systems. That flexibility is built into its core.”, added Kasper Isager who is Bare’s Technical Lead.
The Complete Peer-to-Peer Stack: Pear + Bare
Applications written for Bare enjoy all the benefits of Holepunch’s Pear Runtime, in that their peer-to-peer foundation removes the need for any centralized servers, thus eliminating any server costs and maintaining complete data privacy. So you can now run any device though a completely peer-to-peer system without the need to send your data to anyone, anywhere.
Bare works seamlessly within the Holepunch ecosystem — you get Bare when you use our full open source platform. Pear auto updates, and all of the Bare runtime is included in these updates.
With Bare and Pear together you have a new type of container model. It is minimal, modular, powerful and fast. It enables you to run apps anywhere and meets all your objectives at once.
Our CEO Mathias summed up our own experience with the power of Bare, “It’s been incredible to see the internal transformation with teams building on Bare in Holepunch. Now we write code for desktop and mobile exactly once, but ship it everywhere. Total gamechanger for apps like Keet and Pear Runtime.”
Write-once-run-anywhere has been attempted throughout the generations of code development but was almost a fundamental fallacy. But with Bare, it’s a reality. It can run anywhere and can run Pear anywhere on a peer-to-peer basis, maintaining the highest level of security and efficiency.
Learn more about Bare at https://bare.pears.com/