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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#401

Post by genshii »

Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

Hi Jarred, thanks for all your work on Bun.

I know that one thing you guys are working on or are at least aware of is the size of single-file executables. From a technical perspective, is there a path forward on this?

I'm not familiar with Bun's internals, but in order to get the size down, it seems like you'd have to somehow split up/modularize Bun itself and potentially JavaScriptCore as well (not sure how big the latter is). That way only the things that are actually being used by the bundled code are included in the executable.

Is this even possible? Is the difficulty on the Bun/Zig side of things, or JSC, or something else? Seems like a very interesting (and very difficult) technical problem.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#402

Post by mjr00 »

furyofantares wrote: post #365
mjr00 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't they just use AI to write their own Bun instead of wasting 8-9 figures on this company? Makes no sense.

From the article, Claude Code is being used extensively to develop Bun already. > Over the last several months, the GitHub username with the most merged PRs in Bun's repo is now a Claude Code bot. We have it set up in our internal Discord and we mostly use it to help fix bugs. It opens PRs with tests that fail in the earlier system-installed version of Bun before the fix and pass in the fixed debug build of Bun. It r…

> You do still need people to make all the decisions about how Bun is developed, and to use Claude Code.

Yeah but do you really need external hires to do that? Surely Anthropic has enough experienced JavaScript developers internally they could decide how their JS toolchain should work.

Actually, this is thinking too small. There's no reason that each developer shouldn't be able to customize their own developer tools however they want. No need for any one individual to control this, just have devs use AI to spin up their own npm-compatible package management tooling locally. A good day one onboarding task!

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#404

Post by brrrrrm »

Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

on Bun's website, the runtime section features HTTP, networking, storage -- all are very web-focused. any plans to start expanding into native ML support? (e.g. GPUs, RDMA-type networking, cluster management, NFS)

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#405

Post by timeon »

rvrb wrote: post #323
satvikpendem wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search for pointer exceptions or core dumps on Bun's GitHub issues and you'll see why people (should) use Deno over Bun, if only because Rust is a way more safe language than Zig.

I haven't verified this, but I would be willing to bet that most of Bun's issues here have more to do with interfacing with JavaScriptCore through the C FFI than Zig itself. this is as much a problem in Rust as it is in Zig. in fact, it has been argued that writing unsafe Zig is safer than writing unsafe Rust: https://zackoverflow.dev/writing/unsafe-rust-vs-zig/

[flagged]

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#406

Post by pier25 »

afavour wrote: post #49
cortesoft wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing gives you long term stability in tech. You have to constantly work at staying stable, and it isn't always up to anything the company is in control of, no matter what ownership they have.

> Nothing gives you long term stability in tech. Sure. But everything is relative. For instance, Node has much more likelihood of long term stability than Bun, given its ownership.

> Node has much more likelihood of long term stability than Bun

Given how many more dependencies you need to build/maintain a Node app, your Bun application has a better chance of long term stability.

With Node almost everything is third party (db driver, S3, router, etc) and the vast majority of NPM deps have dozens if not hundreds of deps.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#407

Post by creata »

logsr wrote: post #371
krig wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance. This is just completely insane. We went through more than a decade of performance competition in the JS VM space, and the _only_ justification that Google had for creating V8 was performance. > The V8 engine was first introduced by Google in 2008, coinciding with the launch of the Google Chrome web browser. At the time, web applications were becoming increasingly…

> Vibe-coded projects get bought by vibe-coded companies this is so far from the truth. Bun, Zig, and uWebsockets are passion projects run by individuals with deep systems programming expertise. furthest thing from vibe coding imaginable. > a decade of performance competition in the JS VM space this was a rising tide that lifted all boats, including Node, but Node is built with much more of the system implemented in…

> Node is built with much more of the system implemented in JS, so it is architecturally incapable of the kind of performance Bun/uWebsockets achieves

That sounds like an implementation difference, not an architectural difference. If they wanted to, what would prevent Node or a third party from implementing parts of the stdlib in a faster language?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#409

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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…

> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.

Did they? I see a $7MM seed round in 2022. Now to be clear that's a great seed round and it looks like they had plenty of traction. But it's unclear to me how they were going to monetize enough to justify their $7MM investment. If they continued with the consultancy model, they would need to pay back investors from contracts they negotiate with other companies, but this is a fraught way to get early cashflow going.

Though if I'm not mistaken, Confluent did the same thing?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#410

Post by pizlonator »

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"

Lots of strategists will tell you something like: "Build something that's useful and then there will be money".

That's 100% what happened to Bun. It's useful (like really useful) and now they're getting rewarded

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