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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#471
post #395

A lot of people seem confused about this acquisition because they think of Bun as a node.js compatible bundler / runtime and just compare it to Deno / npm. But I think its a really smart move if you think of where Bun has been pushing into lately which is a kind of cloud-native self contained runtime (S3 API, SQL, streaming, etc). For an agent like Claude Code this trajectory is really interesting as you are creating…

This is an insanely good take I never thought of.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#472

> 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…

Anthropic is still a new company and so far they seem "friendly". That being said, I still feel this can go either way.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#473

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…

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#474

Considering that 1) Bun is written in Zig, 2) Zig has a strict no-AI policy [1], and 3) Bun has joined Claude, it seems that Bun and Zig are increasingly culturally apart. [1] https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-pol...

You’re reading a code of conduct for contributing to the zig project. I don’t think everything there is guidance for everything written in zig, eg ‘English is encouraged’ is something one might not want for a project written in zig by native French-speakers, and I don’t think that’s something zig would want to suggest to them. I read the AI part is much more motivated by the asymmetries of open source project contribution than any statement about the language itself. Fly-by AI contributions are bad because they make particularly poor use of maintainer time. Similar to the rule on proposing language changes, which can suck up lots of reading/thinking/discussion time. When you have people regularly working together (eg those people in anthropic working on bun) the incentives are different because there is a higher cost to wasting your colleague’s time.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#475
post #395

A lot of people seem confused about this acquisition because they think of Bun as a node.js compatible bundler / runtime and just compare it to Deno / npm. But I think its a really smart move if you think of where Bun has been pushing into lately which is a kind of cloud-native self contained runtime (S3 API, SQL, streaming, etc). For an agent like Claude Code this trajectory is really interesting as you are creating…

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sort of surprised to see that you used Claude Code so much. I had a vague idea that "Zig people" were generally "Software You Can Love" or "Handmade Software Movement" types, about small programs, exquisitely hand-written, etc, etc. And I know Bun started with an extreme attention to detail around performance. I would have thought LLM-generated code would run a bit counter to both of those. I had sort of carved t…

I am not your target with this question (I don't write Zig) but there is a spectrum of LLM usage for coding. It is possible to use LLMs extensively but almost never ship LLM generated code, except for tiny trivial functions. One can use them for ideation, quick research, or prototypes/starting places, and then build on that. That is how I use them, anyway Culturally I see pure vibe coders as intersecting more with en…

fwiw, copilots licence only explicitly permits using its suggestions the way you say.

putting everyone using the generated outputs into a sort of unofficial grey market: even when using first-party tools. Which is weird.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#477
post #417

I wonder what this means for Deno. Will this make it more or less likely for people to use Bun vs Deno? And now that Bun doesn't need to run a profitable cloud company will they move faster and get ahead of Deno?

I think Deno's management have been somewhat distracted by their ongoing lawsuits with Oracle over the release of the Javascript trademark. I started out with Deno and when I discovered Bun, I pivoted. Personally I don't need the NodeJS/NPM compatability. Wish there was a Bun-lite which was freed of the backward compatability.

I'm in a similar position.

I use Hono, Zod, and Drizzle which AFAIK don't need Node compat.

IIRC I've only used Node compat once to delete a folder recursively with rm.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Deno does all that. Hell, yarn does too, or pnpm as the sibling mentioned.

Sure, but pnpm is very slow compared to bun.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#480
Has CC always used Bun? When it tries it out many months ago it was an npm install not bun install in their instructions (although I did use bun install myself). Just odd that if they were using bun, why the installation wasn’t specifically a “bun install” (I suppose they were trying to keep it vanilla for the npm masses?)
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