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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#301

Post by kenhwang »

skybrian wrote: post #240
kenhwang wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you want to download open source libraries to be used in your Bun project then they will come from npm, at least by default. [1]. So it seems odd to say that Bun is less dependent on the npm library ecosystem. [1] It’s possible to use jsr.io instead: https://jsr.io/docs/using-packages

Yes, both can pull in open source libraries and I can't imagine either dropping that ability. Though they do seem to have different eagerness and competency on Node compatibility and Bun seems better on that front.

From a long term design philosophy prospective, Bun seems to want to have a sufficiently large core and standard library where you won't need to pull in much from the outside. Code written for Node will run on Bun, but code using Bun specific features won't run on Node. It's the "embrace, extend, ..." approach.

Deno seems much more focused on tooling instead of expanding core JS, and seems to draws the line at integrations. The philosophy seems to be more along the lines of having the tools be better about security when pulling in libraries instead of replacing the need for libraries. Deno also has it's own standard library, but it's just a library and that library can run on Node.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#302

Post by KK7NIL »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #242
KK7NIL wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From the acquirer’s perspective, you’re right. (Bonus: it diminishes your own employees’ ability to leave and fundraise to compete with you.) From an ecosystem perspective, acquihires trash the funding landscape. And from the employees’ perspective, as an investor, I’d see them being on an early founding team as a risk going forward. But that isn’t relevant if the individual pay-off is big.

> And from the employees’ perspective, as an investor, I’d see them being on an early founding team as a risk going forward.

Every employee is a flight risk if you don't pay them a competitive salary; that's just FUD from VC bros who are getting their playbook (sell the company to the highest bidder and let early employees get screwed) used against them.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#303

Post by verdverm »

simonw wrote: post #190
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 :)

If that was genuinely happening here - Anthropic were selling inference for less than the power and data center costs needed to serve those tokens - it would indeed be a very bad sign for their health. I don't think they're doing that. Estimates I've seen have their inference margin at ~60% - there's one from Morgan Stanley in this article, for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-anthropic-billions-cl...

I've been wondering about this generally... Are the per-request API prices I'm paying at a profit or a loss? My billing would suggest they are not making a profit on the monthly fees (unless there are a bunch of enterprise accounts in group deals not being used, I am one of those I think)

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#304

Post by drannex »

diarrhea wrote: post #292
reactordev wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a non sequitur. Both Rust and Zig and any other language has the ability to end in an exception state. Whether it be kernel exception, pointer exception, or Rust's panic! - these things exist. The reason why you see so many GitHub issues about it is because that's where the development is. Deno is great. Bun is great. These two things can both be great and we don't have to choose sides. Deno has it's use case…

> This is a non sequitur. Both Rust and Zig and any other language has the ability to end in an exception state. There are degrees to this though. A panic + unwind in Rust is clean and _safe_, thus preferable to segfaults. Java and Go are another similar example. Only in the latter can races on multi-word data structures lead to "arbitrary memory corruption" [1]. Even in those GC languages there's degrees to memory s…

I'll take a small panic and unwind any day over a total burnout crash. Matters in code and life.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#305

Post by samdoesnothing »

sinatra wrote: post #224
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.

Hah. It can’t be “I need to spend more time to figure out how to use these tools better.” It is always “I’m just smarter than other people and have a higher standard.”

Show us your repos.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#306

Post by samdoesnothing »

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…

Post a repo

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#307

Post by echelon »

jjcm wrote: post #291
andrewl-hn wrote: post #45

I’ll be honest, while I have my doubts about the match of interests and cohesion between an AI company and a JS runtime company I have to say this is the single best acquisition announcement blog post I’ve seen in 20 years or so. Very direct, very plain and detailed. They cover all the bases about the why, the how, and what to expect. I really appreciate it. Best of luck to the team and hopefully the new home will su…

One thing I like about this, despite it meaning Bun will be funded, is Anthropic is a registered public benefit corporation. While this doesn't mean Anthropic cant fuck over the users of Bun, it at least puts in some roadblocks. The path of least-resistance here should be to improve Bun for users, not to monetize it to the point where it's no longer valuable.

> Anthropic is a registered public benefit corporation

Does that mean anything at all?

OpenAI is a public benefit corporation.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#308

Post by throwaway290 »

sankalpmukim wrote: post #42
jjordan wrote: post #21

I don't really see how Bun fits as an acquisition for an AI company. This seems more like "we have tons of capital and we want to buy something great" than "Bun is essential to our core business model".

Does this acquisition mean Claude Code the CLI is more valuable than entiriety of Bun?

No, just that people who borrowed bun 7 million dollars want some of it back...

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#309

Post by jtokoph »

iyn wrote: post #26

Curious about the deal value/price — any clues whether it was just to make existing investors even (so say up to $30M) or are we talking some multiple? But if it's a multiple, even 2x sounds a bit crazy.

One option is that the current Bun shareholders didn't see a profitable future and didn't even care if they were made even and a return of the remaining cash was adequate.

Another option is that this was an equity deal where Bun shareholders believe there is still a large multiple worth up potential upside in the current Anthropic valuation.

Plus many other scenarios.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#310

Post by smarnach »

cesarvarela wrote: post #101
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've found it to be at least twice as fast with practically no compat issues.

Twice as fast at executing JavaScript? There's absolutely zero chance this is true. A JavaScript engine that's twice as fast as V8 in general doesn't exist. There may be 5 or 10 percent difference, but nothing really meaningful.
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