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I wonder why Anthropic chose to spend money on Bun when they could have easily spend that resource on Go which is fairly easy to use and fast. I'm sure their SW

by fhn 6mo ago

I wonder why Anthropic chose to spend money on Bun when they could have easily spend that resource on Go which is fairly easy to use and fast. I'm sure their SWEs could easily everything things in Go. Anyone have insight on why?

siva7 6mo ago
One of them is a much more efficient but obscure programming language from a competitor, the other is what the web is built on.
- debugnik 6mo ago
  In what world is Go an obscure programming language??
  - MoonWalk 6mo ago
    The world of many, many companies.
  - wiseowise 6mo ago
    In 2026 world, whilst you're advocating for 1980.
    - debugnik 6mo ago
      I'm not advocating for anything in this thread, and definitely not for Go's outdated language design, although Typescript is so unsound it isn't better in my book. But obscure is not synonym for regressive.
zwarag 6mo ago
My guess: JavaScript runs in the Browser as well as on the OS. That way you can train a model to be able to interact with both fairly simple. You can also see that their harness, claude-code is also written in js. So I guess they are quite invested in that language anyway.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
bombcar 6mo ago
Is Claude better with Javascript than it is with Go code? Seems like it could be true.
- dgellow 6mo ago
  I don’t believe so, Go has simple rules, snd in my experience Claude is excellent at writing all the boilerplate needed
- silverwind 6mo ago
  Problem with Go is the type system is rudimentary, so you can't "restrict" AIs as well as you could in Typescript.
nothinkjustai 6mo ago
I doubt those SWEs could have used anything other than JS.
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  Ironic that this comment is in thread advocating for usage of Go: "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike"
  - nothinkjustai 6mo ago
    Yeah they should have used Rust ;)
azuanrb 6mo ago
If I had to guess, it comes down to speed of iteration. Claude Code is built on JavaScript, so Bun aligns well with their current stack. Switching to Go or Rust would only make sense if performance were the main priority, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Their current setup lets them ship quickly. A rewrite in Go would likely slow that down. Codex moved to Rust, and you can see the trade-off. Performance improved, but release velocity dropped. They’re also still catching up to Claude Code, so they don’t face the same pressure to ship as fast.
shimman 6mo ago
Yeah, it's the same pattern you saw in the early react days where open source devs would try to "woo" the react core team into getting recognition to sell consulting services or courses. The bun people likely have some fucked up incestial business relationship with some >dev manager at Anthropic and the same pattern is repeating. Only this cycle it's going straight to acquisitions, which honestly seems like a worse strategy and Anthropic will def can the bun engineers in less than <3 years or whenever they face an actual budget crunch that they can't stave off with more gulf money.
fnoef 6mo ago
I’m wondering why Anthropic, who has “the most powerful, hold me bro, AI in the world” just didn’t vibe code their own, better, version of bun? haven’t Dario said that coding is cooked in 6 month, like 12 months ago?
ec965 6mo ago
Claude is still better at writing JS than it is Go.
dboreham 5mo ago
JS is used because it's (still) the only code you can run in a browser. Although node and bun are regular OS processes, their use/popularity traces back to that browser environment one way or another.

by fhn 6mo ago

siva7 6mo ago

One of them is a much more efficient but obscure programming language from a competitor, the other is what the web is built on.

debugnik 6mo ago
In what world is Go an obscure programming language??
- MoonWalk 6mo ago
  The world of many, many companies.
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  In 2026 world, whilst you're advocating for 1980.
  - debugnik 6mo ago
    I'm not advocating for anything in this thread, and definitely not for Go's outdated language design, although Typescript is so unsound it isn't better in my book. But obscure is not synonym for regressive.

zwarag 6mo ago

My guess: JavaScript runs in the Browser as well as on the OS. That way you can train a model to be able to interact with both fairly simple. You can also see that their harness, claude-code is also written in js. So I guess they are quite invested in that language anyway.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

bombcar 6mo ago

Is Claude better with Javascript than it is with Go code? Seems like it could be true.

dgellow 6mo ago
I don’t believe so, Go has simple rules, snd in my experience Claude is excellent at writing all the boilerplate needed
silverwind 6mo ago
Problem with Go is the type system is rudimentary, so you can't "restrict" AIs as well as you could in Typescript.

nothinkjustai 6mo ago

I doubt those SWEs could have used anything other than JS.

wiseowise 6mo ago
Ironic that this comment is in thread advocating for usage of Go: "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike"
- nothinkjustai 6mo ago
  Yeah they should have used Rust ;)

azuanrb 6mo ago

If I had to guess, it comes down to speed of iteration. Claude Code is built on JavaScript, so Bun aligns well with their current stack. Switching to Go or Rust would only make sense if performance were the main priority, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Their current setup lets them ship quickly. A rewrite in Go would likely slow that down. Codex moved to Rust, and you can see the trade-off. Performance improved, but release velocity dropped. They’re also still catching up to Claude Code, so they don’t face the same pressure to ship as fast.

shimman 6mo ago

Yeah, it's the same pattern you saw in the early react days where open source devs would try to "woo" the react core team into getting recognition to sell consulting services or courses. The bun people likely have some fucked up incestial business relationship with some >dev manager at Anthropic and the same pattern is repeating. Only this cycle it's going straight to acquisitions, which honestly seems like a worse strategy and Anthropic will def can the bun engineers in less than <3 years or whenever they face an actual budget crunch that they can't stave off with more gulf money.

fnoef 6mo ago

I’m wondering why Anthropic, who has “the most powerful, hold me bro, AI in the world” just didn’t vibe code their own, better, version of bun? haven’t Dario said that coding is cooked in 6 month, like 12 months ago?

ec965 6mo ago

Claude is still better at writing JS than it is Go.

dboreham 5mo ago

JS is used because it's (still) the only code you can run in a browser. Although node and bun are regular OS processes, their use/popularity traces back to that browser environment one way or another.