alt Hacker News> 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".
Replies
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying: that many aspects of this post seem unnecessary. But I do think there are reasonable answers to your (admittedly probably rhetorical) questions.
Zig is a relatively young language with a small community, and Oven/Bun is one of few places that someone could previously have written Zig code professionally. It's therefore Zig's business to make sure that either it's a good place to refer community members for work, or that they don't explicitly encourage people to work there. Likewise, as one of the highest-profile Zig projects, the community's leaders were understandably invested in making sure it represented the language well.
I feel like I am exactly the target audience for this post: someone who uses Zig regularly, but hasn't touched Bun, despite being aware of it. While I would have proceeded differently than Andrew Kelley here in terms of framing and phrasing (and leaving out some parts entirely), I do think reading this gave me new information about Zig's relationship to Bun. The specific dry, professional post you suggest wouldn't have given me any new information at all.
> [T]he 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.
I think this is the exact point that the article was getting at in the last section. It is okay to not be very good at software engineering or people management! It is useful to know these things if you want to understand why the Bun project made specific technical decisions, but they don't make the people involved "bad people" in a more nebulous moral sense.
The lead developer of Zig is discussing these factors because the main technical decision was moving away from Zig.