The World of Splectrum

Bare Runtime Reference

Reference for the Holepunch Bare runtime — the JavaScript runtime used by Splectrum for prototyping and targeted for production deployment.

What Bare Is

Bare is a small, modular JavaScript runtime for desktop and mobile. Like Node.js, it provides an asynchronous, event-driven architecture built on libuv. Unlike Node.js, it ships with no standard library — everything is a userland module installed via npm. This makes it minimal by design: what you compose in is what exists.

This aligns directly with the architecture of absence: capabilities are present because they were composed in, not because they came bundled.

Source: https://github.com/holepunchto/bare

Installation

npm i -g bare

Prebuilt binaries included for Tier 1 platforms.

Architecture

Bare is built on two dependencies:

libjs — low-level V8 bindings (https://github.com/holepunchto/libjs)
libuv — asynchronous I/O event loop (https://github.com/libuv/libuv)

The runtime itself provides only three things:

A module system (CJS and ESM with bidirectional interop)
A native addon system (static and dynamic)
Lightweight threads with synchronous joins

Everything else — filesystem, networking, crypto, streams — is a separately installed npm module.

Key Differences from Node.js

Aspect	Node.js	Bare
Standard library	Built-in	None. All userland.
`process` global	Always available	Not present. Require explicitly.
`Buffer` global	Always available	Not present. Require explicitly.
Module system	CJS or ESM (one-way)	CJS and ESM (bidirectional)
Mobile support	Not a goal	Core goal. Android/iOS Tier 1.
Embedding	Difficult	Core goal. Clean C API.
Streams	Node.js streams	streamx-based

CLI

bare [flags] [filename] [...args]

Flag	Description
`--version`, `-v`	Print version
`--eval`, `-e <script>`	Evaluate inline
`--print`, `-p <script>`	Eval and print
`--inspect`	V8 inspector
`--expose-gc`	GC APIs

No script — starts REPL.

Reference Pages

Dual-Runtime Code — writing code that runs on both Bare and Node.js
Global API — the Bare global namespace
Module Catalog — all modules with sources and version numbers
Module System — resolution, conditions, protocols
Platforms — supported platforms
Sources — all documentation links

Module npm versions verified April 2026.