alt Hacker NewsI'm not saying that bun shouldn't be written in rust. I'm saying that since it was originally written in zig, there were undoubtedly architecture and design decisions that were made that made sense in zig, but not so much in rust. When rewriting something in a different language, especially one significantly different than the original it is common to need to re-architect some things, and mechanically translating line by line from one language is probably going to result in some low quality code, even if the original was decent.
I think that using AI to translate bun from zig to rust might produce a good starting point. But it was done one file at a time, with minimal human review, and I'm skeptical that the result is quality maintainable code.
I don't want to say that skepticism is unwarranted, but I'm not sure we apply this level of scrutiny with any kind of defensible evenness. I just can't think of a single open source project I use where I'm aware of their refactor cadence and practice. I'm just...not checking in on their feature branches and stuff, and I think most people aren't. I couldn't tell you if the uv maintainers work at 3AM while high on drugs or at 9:30 AM wearing FORTRAN blue ties.
I dunno. I think my sense here is that the bun maintainers did something shocking and dramatic using AI and people are shocked and dramatized. They're not WRONG to be so. But I don't know that the shock comes out of any generalized duty of care we have toward open source tooling. I think the uncomfortable point that bun has been releasing for 6 months with smaller AI code edits hasn't really been reckoned with. If we were actually this invested in what was happening, the migration would've begun months ago when it was clear they were using agents to ship code faster than they were willing to review.