What Makes Bubble Different — And Will It Change?

Questions
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I asked Claude (Anthropic) a couple of questions about how Bubble works in the background. It told me among other things:

“Bubble doesn’t compile your app into optimised code. It interprets your visual logic at runtime. Every page load, every workflow, every database query is being translated on the fly through Bubble’s engine.”

Assuming that’s broadly correct, I wonder why it has to be like that. Why can’t an app designed and developed on Bubble be compiled into Go and React, or Rust, and be self-contained?

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great question Fabrizio, there is a lot that goes into why Bubble runs the way it does.

In essence, as Claude pointed out, Bubble is an interpreted language like Python or JavaScript. There are tradeoffs involved in this but a main benefit is that you get your app up and running fast. So you can make a change in the editor and see the change live in your app immediately

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3

Great question, @fabrizio. What Fede said only tells part of the story. Seeing changes live immediately is NOT something unique to an interpreted runtime. React has had hot reload for years, and tools like Vite can update changes almost instantly during development.

On the bigger question of whether a Bubble app can compile to standalone code: I’ve been building Kross, a translation pipeline that reads a Bubble app and outputs a Next.js + Supabase codebase. Data types map to Postgres tables. Privacy rules map to RLS policies. Workflows map to server actions and API routes. Expressions can be parsed into TypeScript.

That doesn’t mean every Bubble feature is trivial to translate as some platform-specific and plugin behavior takes real work to reproduce. But the core concepts are not inherently untranslatable.

So it’s not actually a technical necessity. It’s a deliberate platform choice. I won’t speculate on the motive…

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Bubble was bootstrapped by 2 founders who were also the developers. They bootstrapped for around 7 years before getting VC money to flesh out the development and support teams to what it is today. Not saying they were 2 developers for those 7 years but being bootstrapped means staying extremely lean.

So technical decisions were made in light of a small dev team that they have admitted on many occasions have led to technical debt. Could they have done better? Most definitely, but Bubble’s editor and engine was unique to Bubble then and even today is very unique. This is extremely true when it comes to the expression editor.

Bubble is another compiler on top of compilers that are built on top of HTML and CSS, so that overhead is true regardless if it’s React or Bubble.

Edit: I just wanted to add that today browsers have come a long way and are becoming even more efficient then the libraries that have been built on top of them.

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Thank you all for the thoughtful responses. Regardless of the technical tradeoffs, I think what the Bubble team built is significant, not just as a tool, but as a new way of communicating with machines. It reminds me of the shift from command-line interfaces to graphical user interfaces in the late 1970s and 80s. The deeper question is whether Bubble can solve both sides: democratizing development and matching the robustness and scalability of the best software out there.

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Well, over the last 10-plus years, I’ve worked with some of the biggest apps in existence…

with millions and millions of users.

Plus, I have worked with struggling apps that didn’t have millions of users until we reworked them.

I have a resume that is impeccable and would stand against any resume out there.

So I have a different take on the whole Bubble thing.

I see Bubble users that started with learning and then, over time, got into other things as far as code goes…

myself, and I’m sure others who have been coding for years, sit back and have a moment of wonder because we just think…duh, you could just build the whole thing from code.

But, that’s not what Bubble is about.

Bubble is for business owners who don’t want all the stacks and headaches of learning a bunch of different things to get an app up and running.

And, let’s be serious here for a minute…

over 99% of the people talking about other stacks and all that BS make enough to barely have their apps break even.

So, can we quit talking about this and that and other codes and all that? I mean, if you want to talk about code, I’ll build your app from code starting from about $100,000.00…

but, that’s not what Bubble is meant for.

I’m surprised I need to say these things to support Bubble…

I thought some Ambassadors were supposed to spread the word for Bubble, but I really never hear them say a peep…what is their role?

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