alt Hacker NewsI also know nothing of the drama, but what I picked up from the first blog post was that even with access to near unlimited funds and unreleased god-tier coding llms from a trillion dollar AI corporation it was apparently impossible to fix a backlog of bugs in Zig code but it was possible to fix them by automatically doing a rewrite in rust.
I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is.
So pointing out that the zig code was full of bugs because the author was doing weird stuff and ignoring advice, couldn't hire/retain any good Zig devs because he mismanaged people and is the kind of guy to do a full rewrite because that's more interesting than fixing bugs or learning the old tools feels like stuff he'd want out there in the public domain.
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> I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is.
The original post explicitly praised Zig, and seemed to be arguing more that Zig was a great tool for the initial version of Bun, but that Rust was better for their needs as Bun grew to a larger project with a larger contribution team.
That seems completely in line with what Zig claims its strengths are. Zig's response to "but memory bugs" has basically always been "Zig is not a language for a big tumultuous project that you're going to throw interns at."
> So pointing out that the zig code was full of bugs because the author was doing weird stuff and ignoring advice, couldn't hire/retain any good Zig devs because he mismanaged people and is the kind of guy to do a full rewrite because that's more interesting than fixing bugs or learning the old tools feels like stuff he'd want out there in the public domain.
All of what you say may be true, but the point remains: the Bun project lead can do whatever the hell he wants with his own project. There is no objectively "right" path here, in a moral sense.
People are allowed to rewrite their own software whenever they want to for whatever reasons they want, people are allowed to be "stinky managers" (Andrew's words), people are allowed to only hire people who want to work 7 days a week, people are allowed to only work on things that interest them, people are allowed to write crappy, hacky code in their project.
What business is it of Zig's that Jarred is (apparently, secondhand) a "stinky manager"? What business is it of Zig's that Jarred wants to run his own company the way he wants to?
Going after the guy's character after he decided he wanted to go a different direction is _incredibly_ petty.
It's so easy to deal with this like a professional: "Zig and Bun are no longer affiliated. I thank Jarred for his contributions to Zig over the years and wish him and the Bun project the best." or some variant of that. Bland and corporate, but who cares? It's done. Move on. Save the grousing for the DMs, keep on attracting new contributors, avoid alienating bystanders/potential contributors, build your project.
This post does nothing to burnish the reputation of the Zig project or its leadership, and in fact has the opposite effect. The message from the top is apparently "it's fine to be petty and vindictive".