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Zig → Rust porting guide

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381–390 of 592 posts

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I remember when the lazy bastards started writing programs using compilers instead of learning assembly language. Now I don’t have a single colleague who can write assembly. There’s whole generations now who can’t code assembly. Most don’t even know what a register is. Hope Zig holds against this latest attempt to make everyone stupid.

There’s a big difference between (mostly) deterministic compiler and non-deterministic LLMs.

[dead]

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#383

This is a huge loss for the zig language and community. As a fan of the language, I hope it leads to some reflection on things that might need to change moving forward.

The big loss for the Zig community would be if they stopped donating to ZSF. They have estranged themselves from it for a while.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#384
post #319

I work on Bun and this is my branch This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely. I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to co…

> We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

Props for the effort man, but people have already picked up on Zig-to-Rust transition.

Poor Zig folks ...

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#385
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love your work on bun. How do you feel about all the constant concerns being raised about the quality of the project lately? I understand some of them might just be typical twitter hate but some of them are real. And I think people are right to question why you are adding image processing or web views inside a javascript runtime when there are bugs affecting production that sit unaddressed. For example on of our bi…

Why not offer a bounty to get this issue fixed? Are you otherwise paying any money to the bun team?

This is getting stupid. Now one can’t even make a reasonable polite question with praise without being asked if they pay.

Bun raised millions of dollars and was acquired by a commercial entity which bragged in the same blog post of reaching $1B. They’re not a guy with an eyepatch and a tin can out on the street.

Open-source developers should be compensated, but they don’t have to be. You can’t reasonably offer your work for free then complain someone isn’t paying you. If you want to be paid, charge for it.

Signed: A long time open-source developer who has dedicated years of full-time work to useful projects without compensation or raising VC money or being acquired.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#386
post #333
post #239

Picking a pre 1.0 language to build your product always seemed like a bad choice to me. Purely on that basis and ignoring the recent drama this seems like a reasonable idea for tech debt pay down to me. Assuming automated conversion can work without making things worse, which is not exactly a given.

> Picking a pre 1.0 language to build your product always seemed like a bad choice to me. Such as React Native? :D

Yes. And don't get me wrong. I have made a living from it for years now. It's a wild ecosystem. Not for the faint hearted.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zig is a moving target. 0.15 -> 0.16 includes some massive structural changes concerning IO and async/threading. Claude has absolutely no idea what it's doing with bleeding edge zig unless you feed it source and guide it closely (in which case it's useful for focused work) - I'm building a game engine & tcp/udp servers with it and it requires a hands-on approach and actually understanding what's being built. I imagin…

The Rust ecosystem is also a moving target. Virtually all crates are still at version 0.x and introduce constant breaking changes: [ https://00f.net/2025/10/17/state-of-the-rust-ecosystem/ ]( https://00f.net/2025/10/17/state-of-the-rust-ecosystem/ ) If you don’t want to use obsolete versions of dependencies, you need to explicitly tell the model that. Then you have to hope it can adopt new APIs it wasn’t trained on,…

This hasn’t been true for some months. Claude has gotten better about adding latest versions of crates, and when it does encounter a breaking change from what it expects it is usually very quick about finding the change in the docs or crate source code.

What you are talking about used to be a pain point, but is now pretty much gone.

Rust can be a real superpower for AI-assisted dev work, because the compiler outputs very good errors, and the type system catches most safety bugs.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the criticism is still a valid to an extent because I don't see how this would give you a good way to evaluate Zig vs. Rust. Maybe a better approach is to migrate a particularly problematic space and bench that on its own?

It's not like OP asked for any criticism to start with, right? This whole thread is pretty good example of why saying "Fools and children should never see half-finished work" exists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Since when was HN ever about asked for criticism?

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#389

I'll be very interested in how this AI port turns out. I am involved in a number of active projects that are being held back by the language / framework is holding back the project, but where a rewrite would be too big of a project to undertake by using only human power. I've had more success vibe coding Rust than I have in more dynamic languages. I suspect the strictness of the Rust compiler forces the AI agent to p…

Rust is a good choice to let LLMs run without a ton of supervision. In my experience you need to monitor the progress heavily and take ownership of the design of the thing you're building or porting. Test harness is a must. Each iteration should run the test and ensure it doesn't break things in other places.

I am in the middle of porting TypeScript to Rust and learned a ton doing this. You can check out the work in progress here https://github.com/mohsen1/tsz/

Happy to share my learnings on this

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#390
post #319

I work on Bun and this is my branch This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely. I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to co…

It is a pity that you can't make an experimental commit on an experimental branch without igniting a fire of delirium through some people who -- if they were able to put their emotional response aside for a minute and could weigh this up on the basis of merit -- would probably agree with the motivations for researching this approach. > if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable Every m…

That's not a very constructive, nor accurate, way of trying to dismiss all concerns around bun that has been raised.
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