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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#531

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…

Don't make a false equivalence, how many times does one get a panic from Deno versus a segmentation fault in Bun? It's not a similar number, and it's simply wrong to say that both are just as unsafe when that's plainly untrue.

The only time I got a segfault in Bun is when I used bun:ffi to wrap glfw and wgpu-native so I can threejs on the desktop. Ironically, the segfault was in wgpu. Which is Rust. But to be fair it was because the glfw surface had dirty flags for OpenGL and didn’t have the Vulkan extensions. So anyone would have faulted.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#532
post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

JS has the fastest, most robust and widely deployed sandboxing engines (V8, followed closely by JavaScriptCore which is what Bun uses). It also has TypeScript which pairs well with agentic coding loops, and compiles to the aforementioned JavaScript which can run pretty much anywhere.

> It also has TypeScript which pairs well with agentic coding loops

The language syntax has nothing to do with it pairing well with agentic coding loops.

Considering how close Typescript and C# are syntactically, and C#'s speed advantage over JS among many other things would make C# the main language for building Agents. It is not and that's because the early SDKs were JS and Python.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#533
Anthropic has been trying to win the developer marketshare, and has been quite successful with Claude Code. While I understand the argument that this acquisition is to protect their usage in CC or even just to acquire the team, I do hope that part of their goal is to use this to strengthen their brand. Being good stewards of open source projects is a huge part of how positively I view a company.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Shl1-ZJI6E

Is this why everyone only seems to know the first half of Dario's quote? The guy in that video is commenting on a 40 second clip from twitter, not the original interview. I posted a link and transcription of the rest of his "three to six months" quote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126784

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#535
post #520
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…

Yea - if you want a paranoidly-sandboxed, instant-start, high-concurrency environment, not just on beefy servers but on resource-constrained/client devices as well, you need experts in V8 integration shenanigans. Cloudflare Workers had Kenton Varda, who had been looking at lightweight serverless architecture at Sandstorm years ago. Anthropic needs this too, for all the reasons above. Makes all the sense in the world.

Bun isn't based on V8, it's JavaScriptCore, but your point still stands.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#536
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…

Could also be a way to expand the customer for Claude Code from coding assistant to vibe coding, a la Replit creating a hosted app. CC working more closely with Bun could make all that happen much faster:

> Our default answer was always some version of "we'll eventually build a cloud hosting product.", vertically integrated with Bun’s runtime & bundler.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#537
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…

Yea, they just posted this a few days ago:

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use

They discussed how running generated code is better for context management in many cases. The AI can generate code to retrieve, process, and filter the data it needs rather than doing it in-context, thus reducing context needs. Furthermore, if you can run the code right next to the server where the data is, it's all that much faster.

I see Bun like a Skynet: if it can run anywhere, the AI can run anywhere.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#539

Bun is such a great runtime. If you haven't tried it, try it. It's got bells and whistles. This will make sure Bun is around for many, many , years to come. Thanks Anthropic. Why Bun? Easy to setup and go. bun run Bells and whistles. (SQL, Router, SPA, JSX, Bundling, Binaries, Streams, Sockets, S3) Typescript Supported. (No need to tsc, bun can transpile for you) Binary builds. (single executables for easy deployment…

It'll be around until they realize it makes 0$, and costs them millions per year in salaries/stock. then it will quietly die

Anthropic uses a lot of bun. In fact, they bet the farm on it.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#540
post #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.

If I was to pick a language, I'd pick the one all developers agree is the best.
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