Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

491–500 of 1001 posts

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#491
Genuine question, why acquisition when anthropic could simply sponsor, contribute and influence instead?

Acquisition seems like a large overhead and maybe a slight pivot to me.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#492

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…

I'll give you a basic example where it saved me a ton of time to vibe code instead of doing it myself, and I believe it would hold true for anyone.

Creating ~50 different types of calculators in JavaScript. Gemini can bang out in seconds what would take me far longer (and it's reasonable at basic tailwind style front-end design to boot). A large amount of work smashed down to a couple of days of cumulative instruction + testing in my spare time. It takes far long to think of how I want something to function in this example than it does for Gemini to successfully produce it. This is a use case scenario where something like Gemini 3 is exceptionally capable, and far exceeds the capability requirements needed to produce a decent outcome.

Do I want my next operating system vibe coded by Gemini 3? Of course not. Can it knock out front-end JavaScript tasks trivially? Yes, and far faster than any human could ever do it. Classic situation of using a tool for things it's particularly well suited.

Here's another one. An SM-24 Geophone + Raspberry PI 5 + ADC board. Hey Gemini / GPT, I need to build bin files from the raw voltage figures + timestamps, then using flask I need a web viewer + conversion on the geophone velocity figures for displacement and acceleration. Properly instructed, they'll create a highly functional version of that with some adjustments/iteration in 15-30 minutes. I basically had them recreate REW RTA mode for my geophone velocity data, and there's no way a person could do it nearly as fast. It requires some checking and iteration, and that's assumed in the comparison.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#493
Genuine question: why js?

Why not something like c#: native, fast, crossplatform, strongly-typed, great tooling, supports both scripting (ie single file-based) and compiled to a binary with no dependency whatsoever (nativeAOT), great errors and error stacks, list goes on.

All great for AI to recover during its iterations of generating something useful.

Genuinely perplexed.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#494
post #272
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.

> the Madoff scam is only ~$70b in total

Incorrect - that was the fraudulent NAV.

An estimate for true cash inflow that was lost is about $20 billion (which is still an enormous number!)

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#495

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…

My team has been using it in prod for about a year now. There were some minor bugs in the runtime's implementation of buffers in 1.22 (?), but that was about the only issue we ran into.

The nice things:

1. It's fast.

2. The standard library is great. (This may be less of an advantage over Deno.)

3. There's a ton of momentum behind it.

4. It's closer to Node.js than Deno is, at least last I tried. There were a bunch of little Node Deno papercuts. For example, Deno wanted .ts extensions on all imports.

5. I don't have to think about JSR.

The warts:

1. The package manager has some issues that make it hard for us to use. I've forgotten why now, but this in particular bit us in the ass: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/6608. We use PNPM and are very happy with it, even if it's not as fast as Bun's package manager.

Overall, Deno felt to me like they were building a parallel ecosystem that I don't have a ton of conviction in, while Bun feels focused on meeting me where I am.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#497
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…

It's fine but why is Js a good language for agents? I mean sure its faster than python but wouldn't something that compiles to native be much better?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#498
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…

[flagged]

This matches some previous comments around LLMs driving adoption of programming languages or frameworks. If you ask Claude to write a web app, why not have it use your own framework, that it was trained on, by default?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#499
post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Currently Claude etc. can interact with services (including AWS) via MCPs. What the user you're replying to is saying the Bun acquisition looks silly as a dev tool for Node. However if you look at their binding work for services like s3[0], the LLM will be able to interact directly with cloud services directly (lower latency, tighter integration, simplified deployment). 0: https://bun.com/docs/runtime/s3

That doesn't make sense either. Agents already have access to MCPs and Tools. Your example is solved by having an S3 wrapper as a set of tools.
Post reply on HN