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I imagine claude is better at Rust than Zig?
by Avicebron 6mo ago
I imagine claude is better at Rust than Zig?
- fcarraldo 6mo agoContributors and maintainers will also be easier to find in Rust than Zig. Zig is a great language and I want to see it succeed, but this is a prudent move for Bun.
- versecafe 6mo agoThis is likely irrelevant given bun has stopped taking community PR's entirely and Jarred is pitching that human contributors should be banned.
- etoxin 6mo agoThere is like 1,713 open PR's on the Bun repo. I'm assuming all are from Claude or robobun?. I guess this gives us an insight on what the claude-code workflow look likes. Crazy times.
- ModernMech 6mo agohttps://lobste.rs/s/otxkjw/bun_js_runtime_is_being_vibe_ported_from#c_qfia71 https://lobste.rs/s/otxkjw/bun_js_runtime_is_being_vibe_port... > The regular pull requests for bun are wild too: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls?q=is%3Apr+ https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls?q=is%3Apr+ > Most are created autonomously by @robobun, checked for duplicates with a GitHub action (powered by Claude), reviewed by @coderabbitai and @claude. Meanwhile the CI is broken and @robobun finally closes a portion of its own PRs because they duplicate other PRs it has written. (Merging into main is still done by a human.)
- jabedude 6mo agoWhere is a source for either of these extraordinary claims?
- csande17 6mo agohttps://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284
- shadowfiend 6mo agoThe gp's interpretation of that tweet is such a completely incorrect reading as to make one think it's likely disingenuous.
- slopinthebag 6mo ago> I expect OSS to go the opposite direction: no human contribution allowed. How is it an incorrect interpretation? Jared is indeed pitching/suggesting/predicting that human contribution will not be allowed in the near future, i.e. banned.
- Philpax 6mo agoA prediction is not a policy.
- sandbags 6mo agoWhen you use the word “allowed” it becomes a policy.
- NewsaHackO 6mo agoNo, it doesn't.
- sandbags 6mo agoWhat would be required for you to see it as a policy?
- kelnos 6mo ago
- unclad5968 6mo agoI don't think Zig is different enough from rust or any other systems language for it to matter. If you can write rust you can write Zig.
- jaggederest 6mo agoAnthropic makes claude, claude can write Rust like a champ and struggles at Zig. It's a straightforward "training data" argument. I think there are even longer term plays that Anthropic should be looking at, in this space, but it seems like they've decided rust is the right thing, so fair play. I would be (am!) thinking about making an LLM optimized high level language that you can generate / train on intensively because you control the language spec.
- dnautics 6mo agoclaude does not struggle with zig? not in my hands anyways.
- aabhay 6mo agoClaude doesn’t write Rust like a champ. It’s still miles ahead at js and python than it is at rust. It can do macros and single file optimizations but its gotten really stuck in type hell and tried to dyn everything on multiple occasions for me.
- vlovich123 6mo agoClaude struggling at Rust: not getting types correct, using the wrong abstractions, not implementing things correctly Claude struggling at Zig: the above + memory safety issues if you run “fast” mode. It is generally true that Rust code tends to be written in a way that the compiler catches the issue at compile time. The same is not as true for Zig, Python or JS
- fireant 6mo agoAs a human occasionally writing Rust I've also frequently got stuck in type hell.
- chrisweekly 6mo ago100%. For many people, Bun is the only reason they've even heard of Zig. I'm not in a position to comment intelligently on comparative language features per se, but when it comes to mindshare and community size, Rust is a clear winner.
- majormajor 6mo agofwiw before today I'd heard of Zig and not Bun :D something JS-adjacent could certainly be more known than an obscure language but are that many people using drop-in node replacements?
- Dylan16807 6mo agofwiw I knew about both but I had no idea Bun was written in Zig.
- chrisweekly 6mo agoalt runtimes are still pretty niche, but deno and bun do have some degree of adoption. For Bun, the runtime is actually sometimes perceived as unwanted baggage, (eg a consulting client of mine wanted to pursue bun for its build tooling but had no interest in changing the runtime). IMHO, node (with Vite and PNPM) is the right call for the vast majority.
- TheRoque 6mo agoWhy didn't they use Rust in the first place then ? All this was true before AI
- tux1968 6mo agoAnthropic only acquired Bun in December of last year. They weren't there in the first place, to make the decision.
- epolanski 6mo agoZig has some advantages for such projects, especially in the beginning. Among them: - much easier to iterate on (due to the language being simpler and compilation much faster) - native C/C++ interops (Zig can compile C and C++ and mix it with Zig) which is crucial for a node-replacement runtime that runs an open source JS engine - fewer dependencies and trivial static linking I guess that now that they've been acquired by Anthropic there's this combination of having both in-house Rust talent, AI which does better on Rust, and the funding and resources necessary to undertake such a migration.
- dolmen 6mo agoAlso: Anthropic bought Bun to not depend on node.js. But now they are dependent on Zig which is a moving target and is hostile to them because not accepting their contributions.
- 12_throw_away 6mo ago> But now they are dependent on Zig which [...] is hostile to them because not accepting their contributions I'm struggling to figure out how to even start interrogating this notion. What does this mean?
- GuB-42 6mo agoI wouldn't call any port "prudent". In general, taking mature software and doing any major rewrite is one of the riskiest thing you can do. It is a large scale attempt to fix what isn't broken. Sometimes it is worth it, but it may also kill projects. A risky move. And AI doesn't help its cause. AI can save a lot of time when making ports, it is one of the things it does best, but it doesn't protect from regressions. I am not using Bun in production, but if I was, I would consider it a risk. Not because of Rust vs Zig, but for changing things that work.
- allthetime 6mo agoZig is a moving target. 0.15 -> 0.16 includes some massive structural changes concerning IO and async/threading. Claude has absolutely no idea what it's doing with bleeding edge zig unless you feed it source and guide it closely (in which case it's useful for focused work) - I'm building a game engine & tcp/udp servers with it and it requires a hands-on approach and actually understanding what's being built. I imagine these are not really concerns with rust at this point. In my ideal world the team behind bun would be putting in the work to keep up with modern zig, but it's starting to look like they are running mostly on vibes in which case rust might be a better choice.
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- rudedogg 6mo ago> it requires a hands-on approach and actually understanding what's being built. I think this is true regardless of what language you’re using. I’ve built a lot in Zig and there’s no difference between vibing stuff in it versus TypeScript/React. Claude can “one-shot” them both, and will mimic existing code or grep the standard library to figure everything out.
- dns_snek 6mo agoThe code may run but it's rarely idiomatic. For example they almost never define functions inside the struct/union/enum namespace unless it already exists and follows that style, i.e. I expect "foo.bar()" but they make it "FooMod.bar(foo)".
- 10000truths 6mo ago> unless you feed it source Which isn't particularly difficult - the language docs and std source come with the installation, so all you need to do is tell Claude where those directories are in your skill/plugin/CLAUDE.md. > and guide it closely (in which case it's useful for focused work) It does struggle sometimes with writing code that compiles and uses the APIs correctly. My approach to that so far has been to write test blocks describing the desired interface + semantics, and asking Claude to (`zig test` -> fix errors) in a loop until all the tests pass.
- kllrnohj 6mo agoI would expect all LLMs are going to be better at Rust than Zig - a strong, thorough compiler will simply prevent more mistakes, and the benefits of a "simple" language decreases the larger the code base gets. The more abstractions exist, the less valuable "no hidden control flow" or "no hidden allocations" from the standard library get, and that's before you add the mother of all abstractions of vibe coding.
- pizlonator 6mo agoI have no doubt that LLMs are good at Rust. But I can’t reconcile the reasoning about “strong, thorough compiler” with the fact that LLMs are also fantastic at Ruby. They also write really great posix shell (including very sophisticated scripts) and python. Something more subtle is going on.
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- josephg 6mo agoThey do work well. But I still see the occasional type related issue or bug from refactoring that claude will introduce into javascript and python code. It seems to be happening less and less frequently as the models get better. But, the rust compiler catches real bugs in LLM code. I consider that a win. Has anyone made any cross language benchmarks for LLMs? I wonder if rust's conceptual complexity makes it harder for LLMs to write? If all you care about is working software, which language is best for LLMs? Python, because there's more example code? Go or Java, because they're simpler languages? Ruby because its terse? Rust because of the compiler? I'd love to see a comparison!