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Completely unbased, but I don’t want to have to do anything with bun anymore. It’s just a gut feeling, but I don’t trust them and support them. They fork Zig t

by jwpapi 5mo ago

Completely unbased, but I don’t want to have to do anything with bun anymore. It’s just a gut feeling, but I don’t trust them and support them. They fork Zig to utilize LLM rewrites and build something the Zig team clearly disregarded (non-deterministic compiling) And now like a whiny baby they LLM rewrite to Rust. There is a very real chance that Zig design philosophy got them to the point where they are now by enforcing to make the tough but precise decisions and the Rust rewrite is the start of the downfall. It’s purely politics-based not technical, but it seems like bun is full on pampered by Claude. So much that I wouldn’t wonder that the next marketing piece of Anthropic is. Claude Mythos rewrote leading 950k LOC JS Runtime to Rust.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
tln 5mo ago
> And now like a winey baby they LLM rewrite to Rust. I didn't see any whining from Jarred, this seems like misplaced sentiment > It’s purely politics-based The linked twitter thread gives clear technical justifications
- cute_boi 5mo ago
  It looks more political than technical. Also, criticizing the Zig team for not making any AI contributions before this gives a hint.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- jwpapi 5mo ago
  > I am so tired of worrying about & spending lots of time fixing memory leaks and crashes and stability issues There are legit reasons to rewrite a program in a better fitting language, but as a runtime to be "tired of worrying about & spending lots of time fixing memory leaks and crashes and stability" is really borderline to me. Also there are way more things to it than just compile time and tests: you reset mental model and will lose contributers. There is philosophy, developer skill and more attached to a language. In this case both compile via LLVM the same and there is no performance benefit given the code is written exactly the same, so it’s developer preference, where the current head seemed to prioritize his own DX over everyone else’s. But again this is mainly my gut feeling. I’m not the first dev that doesn’t like the way bun changes : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011184
- 42iak18 5mo ago
  "They" likely refers to Anthropic in this case rather than being an indeterminate singular pronoun: https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic I'm not sure if the 50% of people defending the whole rewrite live under a rock with regard to the acquisition or have never worked at a US company or a deliberately naive. Companies give instructions. Nothing of this is accidental or prompted by curiosity.
- jwpapi 5mo ago
  Jarreds Twitter is a Claude Code Billboard
  - baranul 5mo ago
    Whether incidentally or intentionally, that rings true.
titularcomment 5mo ago
I agree. From the get-go, Bun was apparent in its design philosophy: we do everything you'd ever want; runtime, bundler, test suite, package manager, all in a new breaking patch each week. With each and every one blowing the established competition out, better, faster and stronger. But it was glaringly obvious that they'd do anything but Keep It Simple Stupid. It was obvious that the only production environment it would see the light of the day in the near future would be YC startups burning one after another at the speed of an accelerant. Now, they're past the point of no return.
HumanOstrich 5mo ago
Yep, the Anthropic acquisition, this petulant Rust rewrite, and bun's increasingly buggy releases (slop) have caused me to migrate my projects (personal and work) to nodejs+pnpm. The risks of using bun are no longer just those concerns around a newer tech and "drop-in" replacement for nodejs. Now you have to marry Anthropic, Rust, and a founder with conflicting priorities.
- stouset 5mo ago
  Having read the comments from the actual engineer doing this rewrite, the only petulance I have seen is from those reacting so strongly to it.
  - fg137 5mo ago
    just wait a year or two.
    - stouset 5mo ago
      How exactly will waiting a year or two make this effort appear “characterized by impatience and grumpy annoyance”, as opposed to the people right now who are loudly bemoaning an engineer trying something out as an experiment?
kakwa_ 5mo ago
Bun is effectively dead. Anthropic bought it in a somewhat dumb attempt to solve their "performance" issues (not realizing their horrible code was the issue in the first place). It probably helped them, simply because they brought in some actually competent developers. But doing so, Bun went from being a public project to more of an internal tool for Anthropic, spoiled for now with AI money and losing quite a bit of focus. Let's hope that when the bubble pops, some of the Bun effort could at least be salvaged. I don't see Anthropic maintaining it long term, they are simply not in the business of selling support for a runtime nor have the (Google) scale justifying maintaining one on the side.
Greed 5mo ago
I don't have the personal investment that you appear to have with Bun, but why does this matter? Do you scrutinize the rest of your dependencies this way? Much of working in the JS / NPM ecosystem is already pure faith on un-vetted dependencies, and this appears no different pre or post LLM rewrite. If it satisfies the intended goal and API contract it originally did, is there any difference? Were you carefully reading the original source code before?
- fg137 5mo ago
  > Do you scrutinize the rest of your dependencies this way? You don't?
  - Greed 5mo ago
    Enough to make judgement calls on them based on the individual Twitter posts of each of their developers? Absolutely not! If I go beyond the initial vetting, that's a minimum of 30+ projects multiplied by however many contributors each. Without even mentioning all of their sub dependencies. It's a pipe dream to think you can ever have a complete picture of the motivations and political machinations of your entire dependency tree.
    - csande17 5mo ago
      I have definitely dropped dependencies from production codebases in the past because "lead developer is widely known to be a clown". You don't need to catch everything but it's generally a good idea to have a picture of, like, the twenty most important dependencies in your codebase and the 90th percentile most notorious clowns in the community.
      - Greed 5mo ago
        What is your definition of "known to be a clown"? I'm not sure how one would even begin to evaluate that at scale. Or what practical impact that would actually have for anything but the most critical of dependencies that might be too difficult to swap at will. Hyperbole, yeah, but top 10% undesirable leads is literally thousands of people? I couldn't imagine following the communities of even the top ten dependencies of one of our (many) projects very deeply. Every single one of them is having divisive conversations in threads like this all the time that never really lead anywhere or sum up to anything meaningful.
woah 5mo ago
Who's the whiny baby? The developer writing some code in their own repo, or the guy complaining about it on Hacker News?
- stingraycharles 5mo ago
  Yeah I also noticed this irony. In addition to accusing the rewrite to being political and not technical, while their whole comment is being political not technical.
  - jwpapi 5mo ago
    I meant my comment not the rewrite
    - stingraycharles 5mo ago
      Ah, fair enough then, you mean want to clarify that a bit as it can be interpreted both ways. And the whiny baby part seems a bit uncalled for and distracting from the point you’re trying to make.
      - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
        Don't give them too much credit, they responded to other comments clearly referring to the developers' comments on twitter about his technical motivations. He's just backtracking now due to your comment.
        jwpapi 5mo ago
        I meant the developers motivation with "whiny baby" and I take the point that this was over the top and I could’ve found better words. But I meant that my comment is "politics-based and not technical", because the gut feeling is more based on my reading of soft factors than it is from in-depth technical analysis of everything involved.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
Validark 5mo ago
I'm team Zig in most cases but I genuinely think they are better off with Rust. They have had a lot of buffer overruns and segfaults as a result of undisciplined Zig code. I think Rust actually is a better technical choice for them.
- BigJono 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - casey2 5mo ago
    I don't think that's going to save them. There are big problems and little problems. RAII+ownership/borrowing solves some memory and file handle issues. But the big problem and this happened before the rewrite, is that they have ceded the system level. Which locks the project into a local minima. It's not a "your holding it wrong" problem it's a you fundamentally have no idea how your own program works past 1 or 2 level of indentation in most places. If the LLM says that something isn't possible you just have to take it at it's word.
himata4113 5mo ago
I consider zig the "whiny baby" approach to be honest.
- __loam 5mo ago
  [flagged]
pier25 5mo ago
> It’s purely politics-based not technical Jarred mentioned having to work on fixing memory leaks as the main motivation to try this. https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2053058171338682875#m https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2053058171338682875#... I was never fully comfortable with Zig given it's much less mature than Rust. Maybe this will be for the better.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  I mentioned a similar sentiment 4 days ago in the original discussion about this project, and HN for some reason did not like that I noted Rust is used in production longer and way more than Zig is, including Firefox, CloudFlare's own reverse proxy, Discord, and many other massive effort projects that affect millions if not billions of people.
- elktown 5mo ago
  People are seriously naive about corporate incentives. You think he'll go "Yeah, it being in Zig has put a wrench in our AI usage and that's not a good look now that we're with Anthropic"? No, he'll confirm everyone's biases instead - and it's working as well as expected on this crowd.
- tkiolp4 5mo ago
  He is a puppet. Anthropic is making him a billionaire. No surprise no one here can notice the difference

by jwpapi 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

tln 5mo ago

> And now like a winey baby they LLM rewrite to Rust. I didn't see any whining from Jarred, this seems like misplaced sentiment > It’s purely politics-based The linked twitter thread gives clear technical justifications

cute_boi 5mo ago
It looks more political than technical. Also, criticizing the Zig team for not making any AI contributions before this gives a hint.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
jwpapi 5mo ago
> I am so tired of worrying about & spending lots of time fixing memory leaks and crashes and stability issues There are legit reasons to rewrite a program in a better fitting language, but as a runtime to be "tired of worrying about & spending lots of time fixing memory leaks and crashes and stability" is really borderline to me. Also there are way more things to it than just compile time and tests: you reset mental model and will lose contributers. There is philosophy, developer skill and more attached to a language. In this case both compile via LLVM the same and there is no performance benefit given the code is written exactly the same, so it’s developer preference, where the current head seemed to prioritize his own DX over everyone else’s. But again this is mainly my gut feeling. I’m not the first dev that doesn’t like the way bun changes : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011184
42iak18 5mo ago
"They" likely refers to Anthropic in this case rather than being an indeterminate singular pronoun: https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic I'm not sure if the 50% of people defending the whole rewrite live under a rock with regard to the acquisition or have never worked at a US company or a deliberately naive. Companies give instructions. Nothing of this is accidental or prompted by curiosity.
jwpapi 5mo ago
Jarreds Twitter is a Claude Code Billboard
- baranul 5mo ago
  Whether incidentally or intentionally, that rings true.

titularcomment 5mo ago

I agree. From the get-go, Bun was apparent in its design philosophy: we do everything you'd ever want; runtime, bundler, test suite, package manager, all in a new breaking patch each week. With each and every one blowing the established competition out, better, faster and stronger. But it was glaringly obvious that they'd do anything but Keep It Simple Stupid. It was obvious that the only production environment it would see the light of the day in the near future would be YC startups burning one after another at the speed of an accelerant. Now, they're past the point of no return.

HumanOstrich 5mo ago

Yep, the Anthropic acquisition, this petulant Rust rewrite, and bun's increasingly buggy releases (slop) have caused me to migrate my projects (personal and work) to nodejs+pnpm. The risks of using bun are no longer just those concerns around a newer tech and "drop-in" replacement for nodejs. Now you have to marry Anthropic, Rust, and a founder with conflicting priorities.

stouset 5mo ago
Having read the comments from the actual engineer doing this rewrite, the only petulance I have seen is from those reacting so strongly to it.
- fg137 5mo ago
  just wait a year or two.
  - stouset 5mo ago
    How exactly will waiting a year or two make this effort appear “characterized by impatience and grumpy annoyance”, as opposed to the people right now who are loudly bemoaning an engineer trying something out as an experiment?

kakwa_ 5mo ago

Bun is effectively dead. Anthropic bought it in a somewhat dumb attempt to solve their "performance" issues (not realizing their horrible code was the issue in the first place). It probably helped them, simply because they brought in some actually competent developers. But doing so, Bun went from being a public project to more of an internal tool for Anthropic, spoiled for now with AI money and losing quite a bit of focus. Let's hope that when the bubble pops, some of the Bun effort could at least be salvaged. I don't see Anthropic maintaining it long term, they are simply not in the business of selling support for a runtime nor have the (Google) scale justifying maintaining one on the side.

Greed 5mo ago

I don't have the personal investment that you appear to have with Bun, but why does this matter? Do you scrutinize the rest of your dependencies this way? Much of working in the JS / NPM ecosystem is already pure faith on un-vetted dependencies, and this appears no different pre or post LLM rewrite. If it satisfies the intended goal and API contract it originally did, is there any difference? Were you carefully reading the original source code before?

fg137 5mo ago
> Do you scrutinize the rest of your dependencies this way? You don't?
- Greed 5mo ago
  Enough to make judgement calls on them based on the individual Twitter posts of each of their developers? Absolutely not! If I go beyond the initial vetting, that's a minimum of 30+ projects multiplied by however many contributors each. Without even mentioning all of their sub dependencies. It's a pipe dream to think you can ever have a complete picture of the motivations and political machinations of your entire dependency tree.
  - csande17 5mo ago
    I have definitely dropped dependencies from production codebases in the past because "lead developer is widely known to be a clown". You don't need to catch everything but it's generally a good idea to have a picture of, like, the twenty most important dependencies in your codebase and the 90th percentile most notorious clowns in the community.
    - Greed 5mo ago
      What is your definition of "known to be a clown"? I'm not sure how one would even begin to evaluate that at scale. Or what practical impact that would actually have for anything but the most critical of dependencies that might be too difficult to swap at will. Hyperbole, yeah, but top 10% undesirable leads is literally thousands of people? I couldn't imagine following the communities of even the top ten dependencies of one of our (many) projects very deeply. Every single one of them is having divisive conversations in threads like this all the time that never really lead anywhere or sum up to anything meaningful.

woah 5mo ago

Who's the whiny baby? The developer writing some code in their own repo, or the guy complaining about it on Hacker News?

stingraycharles 5mo ago
Yeah I also noticed this irony. In addition to accusing the rewrite to being political and not technical, while their whole comment is being political not technical.
- jwpapi 5mo ago
  I meant my comment not the rewrite
  - stingraycharles 5mo ago
    Ah, fair enough then, you mean want to clarify that a bit as it can be interpreted both ways. And the whiny baby part seems a bit uncalled for and distracting from the point you’re trying to make.
    - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
      Don't give them too much credit, they responded to other comments clearly referring to the developers' comments on twitter about his technical motivations. He's just backtracking now due to your comment.
      - jwpapi 5mo ago
        I meant the developers motivation with "whiny baby" and I take the point that this was over the top and I could’ve found better words. But I meant that my comment is "politics-based and not technical", because the gut feeling is more based on my reading of soft factors than it is from in-depth technical analysis of everything involved.
wiseowise 5mo ago

Validark 5mo ago

I'm team Zig in most cases but I genuinely think they are better off with Rust. They have had a lot of buffer overruns and segfaults as a result of undisciplined Zig code. I think Rust actually is a better technical choice for them.

BigJono 5mo ago
[flagged]
- casey2 5mo ago
  I don't think that's going to save them. There are big problems and little problems. RAII+ownership/borrowing solves some memory and file handle issues. But the big problem and this happened before the rewrite, is that they have ceded the system level. Which locks the project into a local minima. It's not a "your holding it wrong" problem it's a you fundamentally have no idea how your own program works past 1 or 2 level of indentation in most places. If the LLM says that something isn't possible you just have to take it at it's word.

himata4113 5mo ago

I consider zig the "whiny baby" approach to be honest.

__loam 5mo ago
[flagged]

pier25 5mo ago

> It’s purely politics-based not technical Jarred mentioned having to work on fixing memory leaks as the main motivation to try this. https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2053058171338682875#m https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2053058171338682875#... I was never fully comfortable with Zig given it's much less mature than Rust. Maybe this will be for the better.

giancarlostoro 5mo ago
I mentioned a similar sentiment 4 days ago in the original discussion about this project, and HN for some reason did not like that I noted Rust is used in production longer and way more than Zig is, including Firefox, CloudFlare's own reverse proxy, Discord, and many other massive effort projects that affect millions if not billions of people.
elktown 5mo ago
People are seriously naive about corporate incentives. You think he'll go "Yeah, it being in Zig has put a wrench in our AI usage and that's not a good look now that we're with Anthropic"? No, he'll confirm everyone's biases instead - and it's working as well as expected on this crowd.
tkiolp4 5mo ago
He is a puppet. Anthropic is making him a billionaire. No surprise no one here can notice the difference