It’s made absolutely no negative difference, as we’ve seen in the real world in the last 60 days since the merge.

I feel weird having to defend reality; reality being that it was merged nearly 2 months ago and tons of people have had their pitchforks out without a shred of actual evidence that this made bun worse in any measurable way. But they still insist it was a mistake.

I’ve never met Jared or the bun team but I don’t understand all the personal attacks, I just feel the need to correct the facts. Literally who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?

It’s not like they ported JavaScriptCore (the actual JS runtime) to rust even. All that stuff is largely untouched.

Rust as a language is irrelevant to this discussion, the problem is that bun was vibe coded by a single dude without any open source community involvement. “bun the open source project” is basically dead at that point: don't expect any of the zig enthusiasts who had their code being forcibly rewritten in a language they don't like to follow Jared.

“bun the JavaScript runtime ” is not dead though.

I am impartial on the matter, but I think one of the reasons Bun became a thing in the first place was because of Zig attracted a small but very active developer community. Switching from Zig to Rust effectively alienates that community.

Emphasis on the FOSS project. The v1.4 mentioned is not (yet?) open source, Claude Code is essentially using a proprietary fork, was GP's point.

Bun is now mainly the runtime for claude code. All changes will go in to make claude code better.

It's not about making the dev experience better than node, that use-case is now secondary.

The objection isn’t to the language. It’s to Claude using a version of Bun that is not available to us. We don’t know what’s actually in it.

Yeah same, according to one of the Zig team members, the original source code wasn't all that anyway.

But this is HN, a subsection of which places a high importance on what language something is written in, moreso than what it does (feels like).

Definitely, it was a possible reason why Zig actually matters in the industry.

Now it is a Deno clone, both without anything enticing over node.js.

As an open source - community driven project? Have you looked at the repo on github?

Theres thousands of PRs from claude agents or whatever.

Yeah really feels like a worthwhile place to contribute lol.

I didn't read OP as complaining about the rewrite, but about the (lack of clear) governance after being acquired by Anthropic.

My personal feelings about the matter is that having an LLM rewrite the entire thing as an experiment and then just going with it a few weeks later kills any incentive for a community to build up around it. It's a clear signal that every basic aspect of the runtime can change on a whim.

I don't care about meh Zig being rewritten to bad Rust if it does the same thing, but taking what is presented as" look at this funny experiment I did" and then taking that into production with barely any announcement is what kills off the interest to me.

Bun has been a great ad for whatever LLM they were using but the cool factor is gone now, and that's really what set it apart from basic NodeJS in my mind.

> Why does changing to Rust kill the project? I don't understand the point here.

I'm concerned that the complete rewrite in an entirely different language is not a sound technical decision and instead is a ploy to shed copyright claims from past contributors.

Now, based on comments from this thread, the formerly FLOSS project is somehow granting special access to a corporation that apparently is invested in going way out of their way to push implementations that consume the complete rewrite before the world has access to it.

I for one won't be touching Bun. This doesn't pass the smell test. It feels like a bait-and-switch in progress.

I don't care about the language, but pre-releases the community don't get access to but released (Anthropic) applications do have access to, feels a bit too on the nose after the acquisition.