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Zig → Rust porting guide

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Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#291

Post by kigiri »

Petersipoi wrote: post #167
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it reflects more on Bun. [1]. [1] https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...

Bun is the largest project written in zig. And it isn't close. Bun is bigger than zig itself. Seems like zig isn't mature enough to handle Bun's needs, so I don't blame them at all for looking for off ramps. Only time will tell if rigidity from the zig team is worth the cost of losing Bun. It might be.

It is definitly worth it, and moving to rust because compile times are too slow ? This can't be the main reason for the switch

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#293

Post by jeltz »

andkenneth wrote: post #100
stingraycharles wrote: post #5

Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropic does experiments on their own codebase, the Bun team is not gonna do the same vibe coding experiments”. Yet here we are, what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding. Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could…

They recently tried to upstream an improvement to zig, but were prevented from doing so because zig has a hard and fast "no AI code" rule. Whether you think this response is trying to put pressure on zig or whether they're just moving for practical reasons is up to you. It's probably a bit of both.

I don't see why they think it would work when the reason their patch set was rejected was because it was not correct, did not go in a direction the Zig authors were interested in and is also in an area where they are already working hard on improvements. It would have been much better if the bun team joined forces and helped out instead of vibe coding a broken PoC patch that never can get merged. Compilation speed is one of the current main focuses of Zig and changing the type system to make that possible was a big part of 0.16.

Anyone can hack up a quick PoC, even without LLMs, the hard part is writing code that is correct and maintainable.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#296

Post by carpenecopinum »

Given the recent gripe that Bun/Anthropic indicated regarding compile times with Zig (i.e. that their vibe-coded 4x compilation speedup PR wasn't accepted), it appears to me as an "interesting" move to switch to a language that probably delivers 4x longer compilations than even vanilla Zig.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#297

Post by ivanjermakov »

inkysigma wrote: post #4

So I can't tell if the linked commit is an actual attempt or just an experiment but it did always strike me as odd to make a JS runtime in Zig when my impression was there were a lot of work-stopping compiler bugs at the time.

Considering no public announcement this is just an experiment, possibly leaked.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#298

Post by kadhirvelm »

I can't imagine going from reviewing code in Zig to letting Claude code handle it in Rust. Seems like a lot of change to deal with in a short amount of time. Wonder how much the bun team culture will change? We've been really liking bun so far

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#299

Post by lionkor »

selectnull wrote: post #289

Why not rewrite claude-code in Rust? So, Anthropic acquires Bun team because claude-code uses Bun. They port Bun from Zig to Rust presumably because Rust "is better" (imagine big air quotes here). Again presumably, they want to make claude-code "better". Why make it so complicated? With all the power of LLMs they have, surely they can make claude-code the best possible by writting it in Rust directly.

Presumably they aren't falling for their (extremely obvious) "grassroots" marketing, and know, like any good engineer, that LLMs are not the right tool for this.

It's easy to just see Bun as a marketing stunt, as well.

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