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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#961

Post by sgt »

Cieric wrote: post #103
Uninen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Ghostty is a pretty big success story as well.

Let's not forget about TigerBeetle either. They weren't bought (as far as I'm aware), but they seem to have some pretty good backing from customers.

Are the benefits of Zig really that amazing compared to Rust that it's worth choosing Zig, which is not even at 1.0 and seems to be constantly changing? Also, Zig is not memory safe the same way.

That said, I can easily imagine that the developer experience is superior for Zig. More fun.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#962

Post by qwm »

kopirgan wrote: post #882
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…

I'm also confused.. Why does a generic AI company that helps coding as one of main offering get deeply in bed with one tech stack I mean would it have made sense to acquire golang if it were on sale?

They want to make sure the runtime they depend on continues to be maintained. It's still niche and new, so its continued existence isn't as sure as something like Go.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#963

Post by thatSteveFan »

losvedir wrote: post #446
Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

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 interviewed for the Bun guys and totally flopped because I was not prepared for the interview format. It was "here's a task, do whatever you need to including AI to get it done". From that, I'd infer that the usage is pretty substantial.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#964

Post by oscargrouch »

smarnach wrote: post #310
cesarvarela wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found it to be at least twice as fast with practically no compat issues.

Twice as fast at executing JavaScript? There's absolutely zero chance this is true. A JavaScript engine that's twice as fast as V8 in general doesn't exist. There may be 5 or 10 percent difference, but nothing really meaningful.

We are in the "system engineering territory" and as such it might have more to do with the way the runtime is designed and how the javascript native runtime does things than the compiler optimizations. You have to measure syscalls, memory access, cpu cache locality and a bunch of design decisions that in the end contribute a lot to the running time. So depending on the decisions taken, it can easily happen.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#965

Post by Tadpole9181 »

someguyiguess wrote: post #917
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he wanted to? Do you also berate the choices of people in the 4K demo scene for using too little memory?

That’s kind of the opposite though. I guess if you’re saying that there’s an art to building things using the least efficient means possible just as there’s an art to being maximally efficient (like the 4k demo scene) then your point stands.

Yeah, my point was that people do things for fun or as a challenge or to push the limits of a technology.

Nobody made DOOM in Excel because they thought it made a good engine.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#966

Post by oscargrouch »

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…

Well if anything take as a compliment. As a C, C++ (and some Rust) who lately is enjoying Zig, I think Zig is the only programming language positioned to convince system programming die hard C programmers to use another programming language with simplicity and power backed in.

But completely agree. Its a perfect replacement for C++ and I would say the natural spiritual successor of C.

I gave up using Rust for new projects after seeing the limitations for the kind of software I like to write and have been using Zig instead as it gives me the freedom I need without all the over-complication that languages like C++ and Rust bring to the table.

I think people should first experiment see for themselves and only then comment as I see a lot of misinformation and beliefs more based on marketing than reality.

Thank you very much for your wonderful work!

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#967

Post by ignoramous »

joshcsimmons wrote: post #737
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?

Deno is dead. Seems like there haven't been very relevant or user-informed changes on their roadmap for year(s) now.

> Deno is dead.

Not yet; similar concerns were addressed by Dahl 6mo ago: https://deno.com/blog/greatly-exaggerated / https://archive.vn/L6His

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#968

Post by ignoramous »

esjeon wrote: post #931
soapdog wrote: post #898

oh, I really dislike that. I don't want AI companies encroaching more in my development workflow. Used to really enjoy Bun, but don't want support Anthropic at all. Will switch back to another runtime.

Yeah, I really get that. I’ve been a fan of zig and bun since their inception, but, AI corp deep in the dev chain? I feel uncomfortable, because no one knows when they’ll start steering things into weird directions.

> AI corp deep in the dev chain? I feel uncomfortable ...

tbf, Google has long been an AI corp. The Big Labs are trying to get in to other products/businesses just like Google did.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#969

Post by losvedir »

eps wrote: post #881
abnercoimbre wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handmade Cities founder here. We never associated with Bun other than extending an invitation to rent a job booth at a conference: this was years ago when I had a Twitter account, so it's fair if Jarred doesn't remember. If Handmade Cities had the opportunity to collaborate with Bun today, we would not take it, even prior to this acquisition. HMC wants to level up systems while remaining performant, snappy and butter…

I'm pretty sure the GP was referring to https://handmade.network as their manifesto made multiple rounds here, was discussed at length and far more obviously related to "handmade movement" remark than your org.

Yes, I was referring to Handmade Network, but check out who you're responding to[0]. Honestly, I wasn't too sure about the Handmade Cities thing, but I recognized his name as someone thick in the middle of my question, so I assumed it was a rebranding or something since I don't follow so closely.

[0] https://handmade.network/m/abnercoimbre

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#970

Post by ignoramous »

diarrhea wrote: post #292
reactordev wrote: post #226

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…

> This is a non sequitur. Both Rust and Zig and any other language has the ability to end in an exception state. There are degrees to this though. A panic + unwind in Rust is clean and _safe_, thus preferable to segfaults. Java and Go are another similar example. Only in the latter can races on multi-word data structures lead to "arbitrary memory corruption" [1]. Even in those GC languages there's degrees to memory s…

> A panic + unwind in Rust is clean and _safe_, thus preferable to segfaults

Curious about safety here: Are kernel / cross-thread resources (ex: a mutex/futex/fd) released on unwind (assuming the stack being unwound acquired those)?

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