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jwpapiyesterday at 10:42 PM10 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

woahtoday at 12:23 AM

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

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Validarktoday at 1:47 AM

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.

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tlnyesterday at 11:03 PM

> 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

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titularcommentyesterday at 11:17 PM

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.

himata4113today at 1:50 AM

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

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Greedtoday at 12:22 AM

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?

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pier25today at 2:20 AM

> 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#...

I was never fully comfortable with Zig given it's much less mature than Rust. Maybe this will be for the better.

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HumanOstrichyesterday at 11:57 PM

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.

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kakwa_today at 12:09 AM

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.