alt Hacker NewsThere's a book that changed a lot of the way I think about attention and media [0]. The book isn't very good, but it flags something relevant here. There is a huge asymmetry between the reach of a big, flashy announcement (here: bun was re-written in memory-safe rust in a couple weeks), and the relatively small reach of a correction (often just a footnote on an old article, here a GH issue).
This asymmetry is well understood by marketing and PR professionals, and actively exploited.
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> a big, flashy announcement (here: bun was re-written in memory-safe rust in a couple weeks)
Did they even claim it was "memory-safe"? Every discussion of this topic has had dozens of comments noting that their vibed codebase is bursting at the seams with unaudited unsafe blocks, lightly reviewed by people who seem to not only seem to not understand Rust, but who seem incensed at the idea of needing to understand any programming language in the first place.
Is this the concept that's referred to in the quote "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes"?
Not just marketing and PR, the mainstream media knows that pushing out BS and then retracting it later can have lasting effects because people will remember the original article / headline, and never see the correction.
I thought you were going to call out the problem in the other direction: There has not been a "big, flashy announcement" because the port is a work in progress. It's not done or released. The only big flashy announcements I see are these drive-by dunk attempts on the work in progress code combined with attempts to imply that they said it was done or perfect.
The rewrite was a code translation meant to be a starting point.
> a big, flashy announcement (here: bun was re-written in memory-safe rust in a couple weeks), and the relatively small reach of a correction (often just a footnote on an old article, here a GH issue).
The Bun team never made a big announcement that the code is now memory safe. They've been clear that this is the starting point.
Anyone expecting it to be perfect immediately and to have solved all of the memory problems in the original Zig code is arguing with an announcement they imagined, not what the Bun team has said.
Did anyone try to map this code back to the original codebase to see if this memory problem exists in the original codebase?
The effort required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude more than to create it.
Hmmm, given the general mood in this case, I feel like there's a lot of people keen to find any criticism of the code they can and amplify it as possible. Most of it strikes me as relatively shallow at the moment, though (that is, apart from the fact that merging such a large LLM assisted port is certainly a, uh _bold_ move (to put it lightly), there's not much that people are pointing out about the actual result that feels like it's worse than any other port in progress, but there is definitely a lot of hay being made about any issue that is found).