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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#71

Post by altmanaltman »

simonw wrote: post #38
yanis_t wrote: post #31

I don't get it. Why would Anthropic need to own a JS runtime?

Because they have a product that makes $1bn+ a year that depends on having a good, stable, cross-platform JS runtime.

but they are a company that burns billions every year in losses and this seems like a pretty random acquisition.

Bun is the product that depends on providing that good, stable, cross-platform JS runtime and they were already doing a good job. Why would Anthropic's acquisition of them make them better at what they were already doing?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#72

Post by TheFlyingFish »

Tiberium wrote: post #35

As someone who have been using Deno for the last few years, is there anything that Bun does better? Bun seems to use a different runtime (JSC) which is less tested than V8, which makes me assume it might perform worse in real-world tasks (maybe not anymore?). The last time I checked Bun's source code, it was... quite messy and spaghetti-like, plus Zig doesn't really offer many safety features, so it's not that hard t…

I haven't used Deno, but I do use Bun purely as a replacement for npm. It does the hard-linking thing that seems to be increasingly common for package managers these days (i.e. it populates your local node_modules with a bunch of hard links to its systemwide cache), which makes it vastly quicker and more disk-efficient than npm for most usage.

Even with a cold cache, `bun install` with a large-ish dependency graph is significantly faster than `npm install` in my experience.

I don't know if Deno does that, but some googling for "deno install performance vs npm install" doesn't turn up much, so I suspect not?

As a runtime, though, I have no opinion. I did test it against Node, but for my use case (build tooling for web projects) it didn't make a noticeable difference, so I decided to stick with Node.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#74

Post by drakythe »

mritchie712 wrote: post #68

> At the time of writing, Bun's monthly downloads grew 25% last month (October, 2025), passing 7.2 million monthly downloads. We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic. I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation. > Instead of putting our users & community through "Bun, the VC-backed startups tries to figure out monetizat…

Given the worries about LLM focused companies reaching profitability I have concerns that Bun's runway will be hijacked... I'd hate for them to go down with the ship when the bubble pops.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#76

Post by phantasmish »

supern0va wrote: post #56
phantasmish wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no reader of tech news will take an acquisition of a company with four years of runway as anything but decreasing the odds their product will still be around (and useful to the same audience…) in four years. Even without being tied to a company with lots of exposure to a probable bubble.

How so? Presumably Jarred got a nice enough payout that if Anthropic failed, he would not need to work. At that point, he's more than welcome to take the fully MIT licensed Bun and fork it to start another company or just continue to work on it himself if he so chooses.

History?

I didn’t say it was definitely the end or definitely would end up worse, just that someone who’s followed tech news for a while is unlikely to take this as increasing the odds Bun survives mid-term. If the company was in trouble anyway, sure, maybe, but not if they still had fourish years in the bank.

“Acquired product thriving four years later” isn’t unheard of, but it’s not what you expect. The norm is the product’s dead or stagnant and dying by then.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#79

Post by bigyabai »

singularity2001 wrote: post #53
gkoberger wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Anthropic wants to own code development in the future, owning the full platform (including the runtime) makes sense. Programming languages all are a balance between performance/etc and making it easy for a human to interact with. This balance is going to shit as AI writes more code (and I assume Anthropic wants a future where humans might not even see the code, but rather an abstraction of it... after all, all cod…

"the full platform" there are more languages than ts though? Acquisition of Apple Swift division incoming?

Why acquire Swift when you can write iOS apps in Typescript instead?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#80

Post by giancarlostoro »

singularity2001 wrote: post #53
gkoberger wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Anthropic wants to own code development in the future, owning the full platform (including the runtime) makes sense. Programming languages all are a balance between performance/etc and making it easy for a human to interact with. This balance is going to shit as AI writes more code (and I assume Anthropic wants a future where humans might not even see the code, but rather an abstraction of it... after all, all cod…

"the full platform" there are more languages than ts though? Acquisition of Apple Swift division incoming?

According to a JetBrains dev survey (I forget the year) roughly 58% of devs deploy to the web. That's a big money pie right there.
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