4 ms·

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of

• manojlds 3mo ago
  Yeah and Bun and Zig are not competing in anyway as well. Zig blog post has been updated as well recently btw.
• aaa_aaa 3mo ago
  Stating you use Codex does not add any meaningful information to the case.
  • wowoc 3mo ago
    I think the point of mentioning Codex was that the author of the post has no relationship with Anthropic, even as a user.
    • matsemann 3mo ago
      It's said to imply they have no bias. But someone using Codex or AI agents heavily already have a bias here, just to be clear. Because the discussion isn't just about bun/anthropic/zig/rust, but also between AIs role in coding. So them touting their use of Codex, while not Claude, can still be a bias, especially in the direction they're trying to absolve themselves from.
  • raincole 3mo ago
    It reads as "I don't use Claude Code."
  • coldtea 3mo ago
    Meant to imply he's not a Claude fanboi.
  • drd0rk 3mo ago
    I'm using Arch Linux btw
• vanderZwan 3mo ago
  > Anthropic is not in the programming language market Arguing that a product that sells itself as improving programmer productivity by writing the code for you has no stakes in "the programming language market" because it doesn't sell a programming language of its own is impressively shortsighted. Especially when the leader of a programming language has openly stated their dislike of vibecoding, critisized the industry, and the language project itself rejects PRs made with the product being sold.
• raincole 3mo ago
  Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.
  • embedding-shape 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • lemming 3mo ago
      ...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading the piece about the migration - it was very interesting and the process was obviously quite thoughtful. Andrew's piece made me want to take a shower afterwards.
      • embedding-shape 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        • JuniperMesos 3mo ago
          [dead]
        • self_awareness 3mo ago
          And what is even the point of saying that Andrew dislikes how Jarred acts and works? Let's say the supervisor wants you to write a new microservice. Do you refuse to do it because the supervisor smokes cigarettes and you're an anti-smoker? I think that if you have objections, you should refuse only on technical grounds, not personal.
        • 3mo ago
• lelanthran 3mo ago
  > Anthropic is not in the programming language market; No, they're intentionally in all the programming language markets.
  • eru 3mo ago
    Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another. Just like Google might sell ads on (approximately) all the websites, but they don't particularly care which website you visit.
    • embedding-shape 3mo ago
      > Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another. I mean, they did buy a JS runtime, so surely they must care more about JavaScript and TypeScript than other languages, right? Otherwise that move makes 0 sense. Maybe this part from their marketing post about the acquisition is just a straight up lie I suppose? > Together, we’ll keep making Bun the best JavaScript runtime for all developers [...]
    • lelanthran 3mo ago
      > Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another. Other than JS (which they obviously do prefer), this rewrite would have taken place no matter what programming language was originally used for Bun. The reason for the rewrite was marketing, not engineering. The justification after the fact can be done no matter what language they were rewriting from. Zig -> Rust : "We had all these memory errors" Rust -> Zig : "We had poor iteration due to compile times" Java -> Anything : "Memory is at a premium when we're trying to run a fleet of agents" Anything -> JS : "We wanted a single language to optimise our agents for" You get the idea.
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
• bel8 3mo ago
  Yeah I don't understand these myopic takes. Jarred's post about Bun-Zig-Rust post was technical and polite. Andrew's post in response was anything but that.
  • embedding-shape 3mo ago
    I'm starting to think that a way we can easily filter what's being heavily composed by (SOTA/mainstream) LLMs or not is by how "polite" the public sees their published blog post. If everyone sees the post as "polite", most of it probably been written by LLMs, as they remove anything that could be seen as "nonpolite" and human. Meanwhile, engineers who just want to publish their own thoughts and feelings on a subject, will be filled with stuff the public sees as "nonpolite", and since those hard edges weren't trimmed before the publishing, we can then assume this is actually a genuine person's thoughts and feelings.
    • Anon1096 3mo ago
      Your post seems pretty polite. Did you have Claude write it for you?
      • embedding-shape 3mo ago
        That'd have been fun, wouldn't it? No, I'm too lazy for that, HN gets my raw and unfiltered disgustingly human thoughts and feelings, unfortunately for all of you. For shits and giggles, I asked Sol xhigh what it thought about my previous comment, giving it a "6.5/10 for politeness", saying "it’s polite in tone, but somewhat provocative and reductive in substance.". Maybe this filter should also include provocativeness and reductiveness, and if it isn't provocative and reductive enough, surely it's a LLM? ;)
        • postalrat 3mo ago
          To be useful the filter should give a positive on content I personally disprove of.
  • 3mo ago
• audunw 3mo ago
  The results improving the end user experience didn’t have much to do with the rewrite. Improvements in binary size and speed could be had with similar efforts on the Zig codebase. They spent extra effort to get those metrics to look good to sell the rewrite. The memory safety aspects could be discussed. Arguably they could have had equally good memory safety by employing AI, tests and fuzzing (the Zig integrated fuzzer that the Zig team suggested they use, not just the high level fuzzing they were doing) For this kind of project I do think using Rust is a good idea. At the very least because a project like Bun probably can benefit from a more mature language. But I also think Andrew’s perspective of this process has been essential to understand what happened here, and though he could have been nicer with his word selection in a couple of places (he doesn’t have the clout of Linus Torvalds to get away with it), what he wrote absolutely needed to be said. I find it annoying that people dismiss it as personal attacks. If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks. It’s essential context for understanding what happened.
  • ModernMech 3mo ago
    > If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks. The post did no such thing — it spread rumors and leaned into gossip. There’s no proof or evidence or examples whatsoever offered by Kelley except Jarred’s own public words, which means the post didn’t reveal or expose anything about his management.
    • flumpcakes 3mo ago
      It doesn't need to expose something as new to point out a causal link? Someone saying that work-life balance means all work and no life, and then producing substandard quality at said work seems worth pointing out. A trillion dollar company vibe-porting a vibe-coded low quality product for clout/advertisement seems worth a call-out.
      • ModernMech 3mo ago
        No causal link was demonstrated, only gossip. Maybe if evidence was provided you could say that, but that’s not what happened.
• pizza234 3mo ago
  > Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users Anthropic absolutely is in the programming language market. If/since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy, a success story will tie the given language(s) to the given AI company. Rust may have a tremendous success in the future, because it's much easier to write it with AI (ignoring for a moment whether that's really a good thing). The implication is that Anthropic has a stake in Rust's success. Also, to be kept in mind that devs advertising successfull rewrites often hide some aspects that are unfavorable to the narrative; typically, how bad was the code before the rewrite), although there are other (significant) aspects that have been omitted. > Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. I take you haven't read Andrew Kelley's article (here: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...). Summary: - Jarred has written Bun with very bad engineering standards - Jarred has managed public relations very poorly (e.g. ghosting the Zig foundation) - When they rewrote the project to Rust, and described Zig as poor choice, there has been a negative fallout for Zig - The ZSF is obviously upset because of the poor publicity This is summarized at the end of the post: > Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator. Such people might reasonably worry that might happen to them As a matter of fact, I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post. This is undeserved though, and that's what Kelley explains. There's definitely a personal attack somewhat, and this is addressed in the last (added later) section.
  • preommr 3mo ago
    > I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post. This doesn't even make any sense. The part that you're quoting[0], is Andrew commenting on the fallout from the blog post he made. How could you have thought something about a blog post that hadn't come out yet? Also, if you are talkinga bout the post Jarred made, it was extremely charitable about zig: "Zig made Bun possible. I would never have been able to build this much in 1 year if it wasn't for Zig." [0] "The other critical mistake I made with this post was failing to consider the rather obvious and important point that this might affect Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator."
• lelanthran 3mo ago
  > Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. Not sure; it has some elements of personal issues, but they're followed by a rationale from the author. Honestly, seeing the project lead (Andrew Kelly) take a stand against poor engineering practices without any equivocation makes me more inclined to want to use Zig - their values (in this regard, at least) align with mine. He also substantiates what many of us are saying to all these "Very Senior Chief Engineer with 40 years experience" who are boasting of 10x productivity: these people aren't reading the code they are generating, and were producing slop even without AI.
• shevy-java 3mo ago
  You mean Anthropic has no agenda on its own? That seems a very biased analysis here. The response by Zig could be flawed (speculation, I have not reached this conclusion yet) but I don't see how this offsets Anthropic wanting to promote its AI slop here in any way, shape or form.
• athrowaway3z 3mo ago
  I'm a heavy Rust user who doesn't like Zig all that much. I browsed through the Bun code following Kelly's post, and decided to have Codex replace all my Bun usage with Deno.
  • cognitiveinline 3mo ago
    Care to given an example of the egregious code that led to such a drastic personal shift?
  • postepowanieadm 3mo ago
    Did you use any specific tools, like ast-grep, or did it manual way?
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• whizzter 3mo ago
  It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen. What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lot of craftsmanship, the performance benefits outdid and kept the latter languages relevant for a long while. Still, the performance/predictability penalty didn't give way so Rust (and Swift) came into play. They don't have as many unpredictable performance characteristics as the previously "safe" GC languages but still provided more or less the same guarantees (in some ways perhaps even better for Rust). The brilliance of the Rust ideas did start a bit of a cambrian explosion of languages in that niche, most of them however targeting a bit more of a craftsman position than Rust (that came out of distinct industry needs). The problem as the article illustrates, in car terms. If Java,JS,etc are mostly "regular safe cars" and C/C++ a two wheel motorcycle. Rust is perhaps a rally car (fast but still a car so occupants inside are well protected) whilst Zig really is a quadbike or open wheel cart, not as unsafe as a two wheel bike since you won't slide for the smallest oil/ice patch but flipping over is still dangerous as hell. And that takes us to the crux, so many developers who love the craft and perfection (and don't live under- or perhaps care of- financial constraints) think that "good careful" developers is all that's needed and don't see dangerous language designs as a problem. I'm an older developer, and given that I can write "good careful code", but 90% of the time it's also a matter of time and financial constraints so I wouldn't trust mine (or anyone elses for that matter) code written under those "industry" conditions. I think Zig has a lot of nice perks, but it was obvious from day 1 that it's very much for people that love their hacking freedom over writing code for todays hostile world.
  • Zecc 3mo ago
    That was a pretty good car analogy. Thank you. Edit to add: I'm unsure where assembly would sit in this analogy. Skateboard? Monocycle? Perhaps ice skates.
    • whizzter 3mo ago
      Ice skates with a rocket engine on your back?
• simondotau 3mo ago
  Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic's posts were sanctimonious, self-serving, tone-concealed delegitimisation of Zig. Kelly's post was a strategically poor but sincere individual understandably frustrated at this concealed attack, expressing his honest feelings about the situation.
• torginus 3mo ago
  Andrew Kelley mentioned that the rewrite did bring technical improvements, however those were not tied to Rust and could've been made in the Zig codebase.
• Thanemate 3mo ago
  The moment technical decisions are influenced by LLM compatibility and LLM performance, they basically are. Remember the days where teams would adopt technologies based on how familiar the members are with them? "Now that the AI is here" and is the one writing code, to the point where Linkedin devs flex how it's been months since they touched source code, teams adopt technologies based on how familiar AI is with them.
• afavour 3mo ago
  > Anthropic is not in the programming language market; Did we just read the same blog post? I see no assertion in it that Anthropic is in the programming language market, rather that this rewrite was a marketing opportunity for them they were happy to lean into. > For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines. The latter part of the post is much less about Anthropic and more about AI coding in general so I’d say it’s still very relevant to your interests.
• nozzlegear 3mo ago
  > Anthropic is not in the programming language market; The article by Ray Myers makes the case that Anthropic is in the programming language market by way of them having a clear monetary stake in making their agents look supremely capable of all tasks, up to and including rewriting an entire Zig codebase to Rust. From TFA: > Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering. They need you to believe they can do that. Well, maybe it’s not you that they need to convince. Maybe it’s your C-Suite, various world leaders, or the manager of your retirement fund. They’ve raised $132 billion in investment, and are approaching an IPO valued over $1 trillion. Since they cannot show profitability, this depends on selling their hypothetical future impact. > In literary terms, Anthropic is an unreliable narrator. > One of their key narratives is: Coding is going away, then the rest of software engineering, and eventually most other human labor. This kind of money behind this kind of story has an impact, regardless of how true we think the story is.