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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#701

Post by AndyKelley »

smj-edison wrote: post #667
dgroshev wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about exquisite and small. Bun genuinely made me doubt my understanding of what good software engineering is. Just take a look at their code, here are a few examples: - this hand-rolled JS parser of 24k dense, memory-unsafe lines: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/c42539b0bf5c067e3d085646... (this is a version from quite a while ago to exclude LLM impact) - hand-rolled re-implementation of S3 directory…

I can't speak as much about the last two examples, but writing a giant parser file is pretty common in Zig from what I've seen. Here's Zig's own parser, for example[1]. I'm also not sure what you mean by memory unsafe, since all slices have bounds checks. It also looks like this uses an arena allocator, so lifetime tracking is pretty simple (dump everything onto the allocator, and copy over the result at the end). Gr…

It used to be arena-allocated but now it's using a different technique which I outlined in this talk: https://vimeo.com/649009599

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#702

Post by [deleted] »

sktrdie wrote: post #462
Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

I've never personally used Bun. I use node.js I guess. What makes Bun fundamentally better at AI than, say, bundling a node.js app that can run anywhere? If the answer is performance, how does Bun achieve things quicker than Node?

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#703

Post by notnullorvoid »

pier25 wrote: 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?

Bun and Deno's goals seem quite different, I don't expect that to change. Bun is a one stop shop with an ever increasing number of built-in high-level APIs. Deno is focused on low level APIs, security, and building out a standard lib/ecosystem that (mostly) supports all JS environments.

People who like Bun for what it is are probably still going to, and same goes for Deno.

That being said I don't see how Anthropic is really adding long term stability to Bun.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#704

Post by dcre »

tshaddox wrote: post #573
simonw wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acquihiring usually means that the product the team are working on will be ended and the team members will be set to work on other aspects of the existing company.

That is part of the definition given in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, but I think it’s a blurry line when the acquired company is essentially synonymous with a single open source project and the buyer wants the team of experts to continue developing that open source project.

No it isn’t. That’s not an acquihire. They’re keeping the product.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#706

Post by [deleted] »

locknitpicker wrote: post #671
chatmasta wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, (...) I've heard that TypeScript is pretty rough on agentic coding loops because the idiomatic static type assertion code ends up requiring huge amounts of context to handle in a meaningful way. Is there any truth to it?

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#707

Post by TeaVMFan »

kreijstal wrote: post #647
wiseowise wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the browser, and no – webassembly doesn't count, otherwise you can say the same about Go and others.

java did run in the browser once.... it was embedded directly on the browser there was also nsapi you could also run java with js if you are brave enough https://kreijstal.github.io/java-tools/

Java runs in the browser currently, after a transpilation step (same as .ts):

https://teavm.org/

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#708

Post by notnullorvoid »

I am more shocked about the origin story compared to the acquisition.

> Almost five years ago, I was building a Minecraft-y voxel game in the browser. The codebase got kind of large, and the iteration cycle time took 45 seconds to test if changes worked. Most of that time was spent waiting for the Next.js dev server to hot reload.

Why in the hell would anyone be using Next.js to make a 3D game... Jarred has always seemed pretty smart, but this makes no sense. He could've saved so much time and avoided building a whole new runtime by simply not using the completely wrong tool for the job.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#709

Post by mythz »

yellow_lead wrote: post #546
ok_dad wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Java can run anywhere too

AI tools value simplicity, fast bootstrapping and iterations, this rules out the JVM which has the worst build system and package repositories I've ever had the displeasure of needing to use. Check in gradle binaries in 2025? Having to wait days for packages to sync? Windows/Linux gradle wrappers for every project? Broken builds and churn after every major upgrade. It's broken beyond repair.

By contrast `bun install` is about as good as it gets.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#710

Post by solumunus »

mokarma wrote: post #122

Quote from the CEO of Anthropic in March 2025: "I think we'll be there in three to six months where AI is writing 90% of the code and then in 12 months we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code"

It’s writing 90% of my code now but it’s 100% reliant on me to do that effectively.
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