5 ms·
From 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226 > I work on Bun and this is my branch > > Th
by legerdemain 5mo ago
From 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226
> I work on Bun and this is my branch
>
> This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
>
> I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side.
- logicprog 5mo agoLooks like he did the maintainability performance and test suite checks and made his decision :)
- jazzypants 5mo agoHonestly, I fully support the rewrite to Rust, but he should have just owned this from the start. I'm sure he knew in the back of his mind how dedicated he was to that branch as he had already spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars in tokens by that point.
- skybrian 5mo agoAnnouncing the decision a week earlier wouldn't help anyone. Maybe he expected it to work (though he didn't say that), but there's no reason to make a final call before seeing that it did work.
- jazzypants 5mo agoFair enough. I didn't say anything about a "final call". It just feels like there is a middle ground between that and telling people they are overreacting.
- fragmede 5mo agoYeah but with no guarantee that it was going to work, why should he have?
- jazzypants 5mo agoYeah, but he obviously had enough confidence in this project to keep the agents working at it, didn't he? Given infinite time and money, if you prompt an LLM about something enough times, it will eventually work. Insert something about monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare here.
- furyofantares 5mo agoHe was 2 days into a project that ended up taking 6. You're being extremely unreasonable.
- throw1234567891 5mo agoBut you didn’t have to sit and type. Assuming that you look at what it did, why not?
- nvme0n1p1 5mo agoBun was VC funded and acquired by Anthropic. He's spending company money, not his own money.
- jazzypants 5mo agoThat's why I said "the equivalent of". Additionally, time and cognitive effort are not free. The work spent on this branch was work that was not spent on other branches. Does that make sense?
- nvme0n1p1 5mo ago6 days is also nothing when you're doing R&D on your company's dime. He could have spent a month trying a dozen different things and thrown away all the code at the end. As long as he ends that month with a clear picture of where to steer the company over the next 5 years, it's time well spent.
- nozzlegear 5mo agoHad my former employers been so lenient with how I spend company time, I might still be an office worker instead of self-employed!
- throw1234567891 5mo agoNot even the company is spending money. It’s their employee working on a rework of the code owned by the company that owns the infrastructure on which the rework is done. And that company is still yet to turn profit. This work is subsidised by everyone who pays for Claude.
- zephen 5mo agoBut he was just working along and someone else outed his branch, right? Dude doesn't owe you any sort of explanation.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- 4aksh19 5mo ago"No one has the intention of building a wall" - Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the central committee, a couple of months before the Berlin Wall was built. The AI companies and their associates are beginning to surpass that level of denials and lies.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- christopherwxyz 5mo agoIt’s disrespectful to immediately jump to adversarial conclusions from a simple desire to refactor and poor netiquette.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoNot to mention invoking a major historical event, appeal to emotion move.
- dandellion 5mo agoFour days ago there was no intention to rewrite, now it's a simple desire to refactor. It's not adversarial conclusion, it's pointing out the clear hypocrisy.
- johncolanduoni 5mo agoRunning an experiment, the experiment being more successful than you thought, and then deciding to put more effort into a bigger experiment is not hypocrisy. It’s engineering. If you think some of the objective facts they’re putting out (like test coverage and performance) are lies, go and prove it instead of appealing to emotion.
- baranul 5mo agoEspecially if given near unlimited tokens to burn through, because any level of success fuels the LLM hype machine, which brings ROI. > It’s engineering. Significantly, but not totally. The marketing value can't be ignored.
- Jarred 5mo agocargo check reported over 16,000 compiler errors when I wrote that message. It could not print a version number or run JavaScript. I didn’t expect it to work this quickly and I also didn’t expect the performance to be as competitive. There’ll be a blog post with more details.
- sysguest 5mo ago> I am so tired of worrying about & spending lots of time fixing memory leaks and crashes and stability issues. it would be so nice if the language provided more powerful tools for preventing these things. haven't used zig...(only used rust) but zig doesn't solve those problems?
- josephg 5mo agoNope! Zig is like C in this regard. There’s no borrow checker. Managing memory is your responsibility. It gives you a few more tools than C - like a debug allocator, bounds checked array slices and so on. But it’s not a memory safe language like rust.
- dnautics 5mo agoIt's not.. but im pretty sure it could be. could probably even take this (WIP) idea and bolt on a formal verifier pretty easily. https://github.com/ityonemo/clr https://github.com/ityonemo/clr
- josephg 5mo agoIt'd take more than that to match rust's borrow checker. Rust's borrow checker tracks lifetimes, and sometimes needs annotations in code to help it understand what you're actually trying to do. I suppose you could work around that by adding lifetime annotations in zig comments. Then you've have a language that's a lot like rust, but without an ecosystem of borrowck-safe libraries. And with worse ergonomics (rust knows when it can Drop). And rust can put noalias everywhere in emitted code. And you'd probably have worse error messages than the rust compiler emits. Its an interesting idea. But if you want static memory safety in a low level systems language, its probably much easier to just use rust.
- des429 5mo agoWhat's your point
- righthand 5mo agoTo demonstrate engineers may not be as skilled and knowledgeable as they appear. To make such a comment then turn around and make an announcement days later indicates that the engineers are not skilled in the tools they’re using or even possibly the domain they’re working in.
- esquivalience 5mo agoI totally disagree with this! I think it's very important for experts to be able to adapt to their opinions based on evidence.
- righthand 5mo ago[flagged]
- staticassertion 5mo agoHe's tweeting his experiences. Calling this "sprinting" and "evangelizing" is just rhetoric. Posting about a project you're working on is hardly amateurish.
- righthand 5mo ago[flagged]
- staticassertion 5mo ago[flagged]
- ianbutler 5mo ago[flagged]
- raincole 5mo agoYeah, that means it's an extremely successful experiment so far.
- lioeters 5mo agoAlso a few days before that: > I expect OSS to go the opposite direction: no human contribution allowed. Slop will be a nostalgic relic of 2025 & 2026. We should have seen this coming after they got acquired by Anthropic, but it's still disappointing. I'm not against large language models as a technology, just thoroughly disgusted how these "AI" companies rose to power, eating the software industry and the rest of society. It's creating a very unhealthy dependency. Think a few steps ahead and start preparing a slop-free software stack and community. That includes Zig and its ecosystem. Even if we (and future generations) don't manage to live entirely without slop, it's more important than ever to ensure a sustainable computing culture, free as in freedom.
- tempaccount5050 5mo agoSoftware companies have been about automating human labor since the invention of computers. It's the whole damn point. Why do you think finance used to be (sometimes still is) the head of the IT dept? Because we automated accounting away. Then typists. Then secretaries. Then drafting. Etc etc.
- claude_delusion 5mo ago[flagged]
- tempaccount5050 5mo ago"ok guys, that's enough progress since now it's my job at stake, we can stop."
- satvikpendem 5mo agoDon't make accounts just to add comments for a specific thread, you will get flagged.
- wiseowise 5mo ago> It's the whole damn point. Believe it or not, for some of us it’s not “the whole damn point”.
- faangguyindia 5mo agoHe works at claude, he has unlimited tokens. He can do anything, he is using mythos.
- not_paid_by_yt 4mo agowhat one has to do when corporate does not not them use GPT-5.5
- scotty79 5mo agoI think such re-implementations will be a huge asset to the process of software developments in the future.
- openclawclub 5mo ago[flagged]