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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#281

Post by simonw »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #276
smcleod wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you do not know how to use AI for writing code. No offence intended - it is a journey for everyone. You have to be setup with the right agentic coding tool, agent rules, agent tools (MCP servers), dynamic context acquisition and workflow (working with the agent operate from a plan rather than simple prompting and hoping for the best). But if you're lazy, don't put the effort in to understand what you're wor…

Do you know of any YouTube videos where you would say they do a very good job of showing off this style of coding?

I made this one recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy4ci7AoF9Y - notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/upgrading-datasette-plu...

My best writing on this topic is still this though (which doesn't include a video): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#282

Post by bcye »

rglover wrote: post #208
TekMol wrote: post #204

What is the business model behind open source projects like bun? How can a company "aquire" it and why does it do that? In the article they write about the early days We raised a $7 million seed round Why do investors invest into people who build something that they give away for free?

Either for a modest return when it sells or as a tax write off when it fails.

VCs do not invest for a modest return.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#283

Post by the_overseer »

smcleod wrote: post #234
bopbopbop7 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, AI writes terrible code for me that would never pass a code review. I guess people have different standards for good code.

I suspect you do not know how to use AI for writing code. No offence intended - it is a journey for everyone. You have to be setup with the right agentic coding tool, agent rules, agent tools (MCP servers), dynamic context acquisition and workflow (working with the agent operate from a plan rather than simple prompting and hoping for the best). But if you're lazy, don't put the effort in to understand what you're wor…

Always the same answer. It's the user not the AI being blown out of proportion. Tell me, where are all those great amazin applications that were coded 95-100% by AI? Where is the great progress the great new algorithms the great new innovations hiding?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#284

Post by krashidov »

simonw wrote: post #199
krashidov wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still confused. Why not just pour a ton of resources into it since it's open source. I guess dev mindshare? It is a great product

Pouring a ton of resources into an open source project that raised $26m in VC doesn't guarantee that the project will stick around. Acquiring it does.

Buying Bun to ensure it sticks around doesn't pass the smell test unless they had very few months of runway left

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#285

Post by pjmlp »

defen wrote: post #244
pjmlp wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, the language would be interesting during the 1990's, nowadays not so much. The tools that the language offers to handle use after free is hardly any different from using Purify, Insure++ back in 2000.

I find comments like this fascinating, because you're implicitly evaluating a counterfactual where Bun was built with Rust (or some other "interesting" language). Maybe Bun would be better if it were built in Rust. But maybe it would have been slower (either at runtime or development speed) and not gotten far enough along to be acquired by one of the hottest companies in the world. There's no way to know. Why did Ant…

Because maybe they reached out to them, and they didn't took the money, while Bun folks business model wasn't working out?

Who knows?

Besides, how are they going to get back the money spent on the acquisition?

Many times the answer to acquisitions has nothing to do with technology.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#286

Post by bopbopbop7 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #263
bopbopbop7 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you pushed a PR that breaks a bunch of tests, added a 5 layer nested if branch block that mixes concerns all over the place, then ignored the reviewer for three weeks, and you’re surprised they didn’t approve it?

> So you pushed a PR that breaks a bunch of tests, added a 5 layer nested if branch block that mixes concerns all over the place, then ignored the reviewer for three weeks, and you’re surprised they didn’t approve it? ...Did you miss the part where Bun used Claude to generate that PR?:)

I did.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#287

Post by tyingq »

liuliu wrote: post #272
tyingq wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had the cash, I could sell dollar bills for 50 cents and do a $7b run rate :)

You are saying that you can raise $7b debt at double-digit interest rate. I am doubtful. While $7b is not a big number, the Madoff scam is only ~$70b in total over many years.

No, I'm scamming myself. Halving my fortune because I believe karma will somehow repay me ten fold some time later.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#288

Post by agumonkey »

TheFlyingFish wrote: post #72
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…

IIRC bun zig code base has a lot of fine optimization too. I think the lead did a conference explaining his work. Or maybe i'm confused.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#289

Post by ecshafer »

Tiberium wrote: post #166
gr4vityWall wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll admit I'm somewhat biased against Bun? Why? Genuine question, sorry if it was said/implied in your original message and I missed it.

Good question, hard to say, but I think it's mainly because of Zig. At its core Zig is marketed as a competitor to C, not C++/Rust/etc, which makes me think it's harder to write working code that won't leak or crash than in other languages. Zig embraces manual memory management as well.

Rust is more of a competitor to C++ than C. Manual memory management is sometimes really helpful and necessary. Zig has a lot of safety features.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#290

Post by OkayPhysicist »

ironmagma wrote: post #261
hedayet wrote: post #127

No strategic roadmap is ever going to tell you: "Build a $0-revenue JavaScript runtime and one day an AI company will acquire you"

It reminds me of hearing that music majors often do well in medical school. Want to go to medical school? Just major in music, duh.

Ha, Physics majors get the same talk about law school. It's just the selection bias of selecting for people willing to make hard pivots filtering out the under-achieving, go-with-the-flow types.
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