Kill the Server: Why Holepunch Threw Away Node.js and Built 'Bare'

When the Holepunch team set out to build Pear—a decentralized, peer-to-peer application runtime—they started with the obvious choice: Node.js.

Node is the undisputed king of JavaScript outside the browser. It has a massive ecosystem, a battle-tested asynchronous event loop (libuv), and the raw execution speed of Google's V8 engine. It seemed like the perfect foundation for a P2P stack.

But as they dug deeper into cross-platform routing, NAT traversal, and mobile embedding, they hit a fundamental architectural roadblock: Node.js makes too many assumptions, and the biggest assumption it makes is that you are running a server.

Node was built for the data center. It carries decades of legacy APIs (http, net, tls) that are tightly coupled to centralized, client-server web architecture. When you want to build a purely peer-to-peer, serverless network where devices connect directly via a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), all of that built-in Node bloat becomes dead weight.

So, they did what any obsessive systems engineering team does. They stripped Node down to its studs, threw away the bloated standard library, and built Bare.