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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#141

Post by dboon »

ctoth wrote: post #50

This decision is honestly very confusing to me as a constant user of Claude Code (I have 3 of them open at the moment.) So many of the issues with it seem to be because ... they wrote the damn thing in JavaScript? Claude is pretty good at a constrained task with tests -- couldn't you just port it to a different language? With Claude? And then just ... the huge claude.json which gets written on every message, like ...…

Ink (and modern alternatives) probably are the best TUI toolkit. If you want to write a UI that's genuinely good, you need e.g. HTML, or some way to express divs and flex box. There isn't really another way to build professional grade UIs; I love immediate mode UI for games, but the breadth of features handled by the browser UI ecosystem is astonishing. It is a genuinely hard problem.

And if you're expressing hierarchical UI, the best way to do it is HTML and CSS. It has the richest ecosystem, and it is one of the most mature technologies in existence. JS / TS are the native languages for those tools. Everything is informed by this.

Of course, there are other options. You could jam HTML and CSS into (as you mention) Rust, or C, or whatever. But then the ecosystem is extremely lacking, and you're reinventing the wheel. You could use something simpler, like QML or handrolled. But then you lose the aforementioned breadth of features and compatibilities with all the browser code ever written.

TypeScript is genuinely, for my money, the best option. The big problem is that the terminal backends aren't mature (as you said, scrollback, etc). But, given time and money, that'll get sorted out. It's much easier to fix the terminal stuff than to rewrite all of the browser.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#142

Post by BoorishBears »

Kwpolska wrote: post #93
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…

They will own it, and then what? Will Claude Code end every response with "by the way, did you know that you can switch to bun for 21.37x faster builds?"

They're baking the LORA as we speak, and it'll default to `bun install` too

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#143

Post by mpeg »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #121

Sounds like the goal is to bundle up Bun with Claude Code insanely tightly, to the point where it doesn't matter if you have nodejs installed locally, but also they can optimize key things for Claude Code's Bun runtime as needed. It's a brilliant acquisition, and bun stays open source, which allows it to continue to grow, to Anthropics benefit and everyone else's.

A nice start would probably be for Claude Code to stop trying to use npm when it detects a bun lockfile and vice versa...

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#144

Post by runjake »

ximeng wrote: post #104

I use bun in a project but Claude Code always uses node to run throwaway scripts. Maybe they can persuade it to use bun as part of this acquisition?

I always tell it to use Bun and it works? Am I misunderstanding?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#147

Post by NiloCK »

This morning I found myself muttering something I won't repeat as a reaction to Claude Code's remarkably slow startup time.

Put the Bun folks directly on that please and nothing else.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#148

Post by KK7NIL »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #134
rvnx wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often it happens that VCs buy out companies from funds belonging to a fresh because the selling fund wants to show performance to their investors until "the big one", or move cash one from wealthy pocket to another one. "You buy me this, next time I save you on that", etc... "Raised $19 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures + $7 million" "Today, Bun makes $0 in revenue." Everything is almost public domain (MIT) and…

If it was an acquihire, still a lot less slimy than just offering the employees they care about a large compensation package and leaving the company behind as a husk like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have done recently.

Is it? What's wrong with hiring talent for a higher salary?

You have no responsibility for an unrelated company's operations; if that was important to them they could have paid their talent more.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#149

Post by frumplestlatz »

ctoth wrote: post #50

This decision is honestly very confusing to me as a constant user of Claude Code (I have 3 of them open at the moment.) So many of the issues with it seem to be because ... they wrote the damn thing in JavaScript? Claude is pretty good at a constrained task with tests -- couldn't you just port it to a different language? With Claude? And then just ... the huge claude.json which gets written on every message, like ...…

I have to admit this was my first thought, too. I'm pretty obsessed with Claude Code, but the actual app is so incredibly poorly engineered for something that doesn't even do that much.

Rust, Go, whatever -- writing a good TUI isn't that hard of a problem. Buying an entire VC funded JS runtime company isn't how you solve it.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#150

Post by kenhwang »

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 always figured Bun was the "enterprise software" choice, where you'd want to use Bun tools and libraries for everything and not need to bring in much from the broader NPM library ecosystem.

Deno seems like the better replacement for Node, but it'd still be at risk of NPM supply chain attacks which seems to be the greater concern for companies these days.

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