alt Hacker NewsMany repeat the point of “$165k is cheaper than team of multiple engineers working on the rewrite for a year”, which I think is flawed — the team of engineers would have produced idiomatic rust, and it would take probably 100k+ of tokens more to make the bun in rust idiomatic rust.
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They also would have produced a team of engineers that knows the Rust codebase.
I feel your estimate of tokens is a few orders of magnitude off, it’s on the low side.
I use more (albeit cached) when centering a div.
Would they have, in a year? The general plan of attack would likely still be the same: rewrite it in rust while keeping the structure as similar as possible, no matter how unidiomatic, then adjusting the design to make it more idiomatic to rust. Doing both at once is much harder.
IMO a team of engineers (presuming this is pre-AI) would have improved the existing Zig codebase, rather than spent time and money on a Rust port in the first place. In fact, I still think most teams of engineers would choose to improve what they have even now, circa AI.
I doubt file by file rewriting takes as much work as rewriting and refactoring the code - especially at this scale.
Yes this is a typical case of showing results fast. I wonder what the cost for the remaining 10℅ of debugging and fixing all the bloat will be. Not so cheap I am guessing
> produced idiomatic rust
I keep seeing this. What is "un-idiomatic" rust?
Yes, and curiously many of the tellings of this story don't account for the costs of the human software engineers (Jarred and the other bun team members) who guided all of this work.