alt Hacker News>I don't agree that them actually doing an entire draft rewrite can just be characterized as them considering a rewrite.
You're right, a rewrite is in existence, and whether it is good enough to be used or expand upon is what is being considered. I don't think that changes the fact that languages don't live or die by whether or not 1 large project using them continues using them. Especially a language like Zig which has taken plenty time making breaking changes. They know this is par for the course.
>I wonder if that's the mentality that got them in this situation in the first place.
I highly doubt it. To my knowledge, the only "why" Jarred has given is frustration with memory issues. Speculated reasons I see are: 1. Anthropic wants a rewrite to a language with a more favorable AI contribution policy, to avoid bad press by acquiring a framework written in a language that is skeptical of AI code quality. 2. Rust is more stable and a better target for AI-assisted programming or entire vibe coding. 3. Bun is upset Zig does not want to merge their fork into main.
Focusing on the issue Jarred gave as why he started the rewrite, I don't see how Zig got themselves into the situation at all. Zig was always upfront that it aimed to be a modern C: simple language, powerful modern features, and excellent compatibility with all things C. While it certainly has much better behavior concerning memory safety and undefined behavior, it has never aimed for Rust or GC level memory safety.
It's not like Jarred has been begging the Zig devs to implement language changes to make Bun development easier. Zig was always upfront that you will have to manage memory manually, and that allows for operator error. I think Jarred is in this situation because he wants to be, simply. He works for Anthropic, probably has no limit on how many tokens he spends, and may have access to their most powerful internal models like Mythos. I would guess he pointed agents at this problem and let them go, because why not? He has likely has no opportunity cost.
>It's not like Jarred has been begging the Zig devs to implement language changes to make Bun development easier. Zig was always upfront that you will have to manage memory manually, and that allows for operator error.
Huh? The patch that Bun submitted was for Zig was about compilation times, and making Zig's type resolution faster. I am sure the Bun developer who is submitting patches to Zig is well aware that manual memory management is a core tenet of Zig. The issue is that Zig has to "pick a struggle"; When using C, you manage all of the memory yourself, and get blazing fast compile and run times. In Rust, Rust uses the borrow checker to reduce the amount of memory safety bugs, however Rust can also have slower compile times due to this. Why would it make sense to use a language that is not helping you manage memory and is slow to compile, especially if you submit a patch to the language to address the issue and get rebuffed?