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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#751

Post by Aeolun »

defen wrote: post #244
pjmlp wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, the language would be interesting during the 1990's, nowadays not so much. The tools that the language offers to handle use after free is hardly any different from using Purify, Insure++ back in 2000.

I find comments like this fascinating, because you're implicitly evaluating a counterfactual where Bun was built with Rust (or some other "interesting" language). Maybe Bun would be better if it were built in Rust. But maybe it would have been slower (either at runtime or development speed) and not gotten far enough along to be acquired by one of the hottest companies in the world. There's no way to know. Why did Ant…

> Why did Anthropic choose Bun instead of Deno, if Deno is written in a better language?

Something about moral and philosophical flexibility.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#752

Post by VerifiedReports »

ok_dad wrote: post #537
dts wrote: 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 tha…

What do you mean by "context" here?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#753

Post by Aeolun »

AndyKelley wrote: post #698
Tiberium wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question, hard to say, but I think it's mainly because of Zig. At its core Zig is marketed as a competitor to C, not C++/Rust/etc, which makes me think it's harder to write working code that won't leak or crash than in other languages. Zig embraces manual memory management as well.

> At its core Zig is marketed as a competitor to C, not C++/Rust/etc What gives you this impression? I directly created Zig to replace C++. I used C++ before I wrote Zig. I wrote Zig originally in C++. I recently ported Chromaprint from C++ to Zig, with nice performance results. I constantly talk about how batching is superior to RAII. Everyone loves to parrot this "Zig is to C as Rust is to C++" nonsense. It's some…

I got to love that the author of the thing can show up and say “Why?! I never said any of that!”

A lot of stuff related to older languages is lost in the sands of time, but the same thing isn’t true for current ones.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#755

Post by VerifiedReports »

papichulo2023 wrote: post #472
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…

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

Yep. Remember when "Open"AI took a bunch of grant money and then turned for-profit?

And kept their fraudulent name.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#757

Post by Aeolun »

samdoesnothing wrote: post #306
smcleod wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post a repo

https://github.com/Aeolun/cool-rust-terminal

I was honestly baffled how fast Claude knocked this out.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#758

Post by manbash »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #752
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…

What do you mean by "context" here?

Under "Programmatic Tool Calling"

> The challenge

> Traditional tool calling creates two fundamental problems as workflows become more complex:

> Context pollution from intermediate results: When Claude analyzes a 10MB log file for error patterns, the entire file enters its context window, even though Claude only needs a summary of error frequencies. When fetching customer data across multiple tables, every record accumulates in context regardless of relevance. These intermediate results consume massive token budgets and can push important information out of the context window entirely.

> Inference overhead and manual synthesis: Each tool call requires a full model inference pass. After receiving results, Claude must "eyeball" the data to extract relevant information, reason about how pieces fit together, and decide what to do next—all through natural language processing. A five tool workflow means five inference passes plus Claude parsing each result, comparing values, and synthesizing conclusions. This is both slow and error-prone.

Basically, instead of Claude trying to, e.g., process data by using inference from its own context, it would offload to some program it specifically writes. Up until today we've seen Claude running user-written programs. This new paradigm allows it the freedom to create a program it finds suitable in order to perform the task, and then run it (within confines of a sandbox) and retrieve the result it needs.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#759

Post by [deleted] »

dkmar wrote: post #745
fishmicrowaver wrote: post #116

My first thought went to how openai used Rust to build their CLI tool and Anthropic's CEO bought influence over Zig as a reaction.

Jarred just tweeted a few days ago about how little influence over zig he has, funnily enough. https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/1994950394955665486?s=20

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#760

Post by Aeolun »

victorbuilds wrote: post #5

I use Claude Code CLI daily - it's genuinely changed how I work. The $1B number sounds crazy but honestly tracks with how good the tool is. Curious how Bun integration will show up in practice beyond the native installer.

Doesn’t sound crazy at all? My Max subscription costs me more than all the other netflix/spotify etc combined, but I pay it happily, and spotify would go before Claude does.
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