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Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

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Re: Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

#601

Post by cmrdporcupine »

q3k wrote: post #74
frangonf wrote: post #54

So the geniuses in the datacenter prefer to rewrite the full codebase in another language instead of maintaining and improving its own fork or contributing to make the current language better. Impressive to rewrite 1MLOC in a week yes, but this is more of a job of a million monkey programmers crammed in a datacenter than a bunch geniuses. And I would know, since I'm a monkey programmer who is in danger now... Or mayb…

No matter how I look at this, it's churn for the sake of churn. Even if the translation was free and into ideal idiomatic Rust (and it's obviously not - it's now Zig with Rust syntax) then this would be churn for the sake of churn. At some project scale the language really stops being any limiting factor, and you're instead mostly dealing with working past past architectural decisions, integration of large changes, d…

It's I think not churn for the sake of churn. It's likely encouraged by the fact that Zig itself will not accept AI written code contributions.

So now imagine your company and project -- written in Zig -- has just been acquired by the world's biggest/second-biggest AI company.

That company's most successful and popular tool is running on your platform that is written Zig.

And Zig maintainers want nothing to do with you.

What kind of pressures, real or imagined, do you think that puts on the developers of Bun?

Honestly, from what I've seen from a distance, actual rigorous software engineering doesn't happen at Anthropic. From what we saw of the Claude Code source, the reliability issues over the last few months, and now this. It's just a bunch of people getting high on their own supply falling all over each other. Quality issues galore and a delirious frenzy.

FWIW I don't think it's intrinsic to AI. Codex is very well written (in Rust, BTW), fast, and consistent.

Re: Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

#602

Post by allthetime »

tvidas wrote: post #173

I don't really understand the point of this. Is it Anthropic showing off well their LLMs work? Was it too difficult to find Zig devs so Bun swapped to Rust? Did Jarred read one too many memes about "rewriting in rust" and took it at face value?? I would imagine that there will be bugs migrating all at once, performance will probably be close to the same, and the maintainers will need to context shift from Zig to Rust…

Claude is significantly better at rust than zig. Zig is changing all the time. If you check my profile comments I did a quick experiment recently to demonstrate. Essentially, Claude could generate a basic working tcp echo server in a few seconds. For zig, either asking it to do it just with zig, or with specific versions (.15 and .16 because some fundamental language changes necessitate different implementations) failed to produce working code in all three cases and also took magnitudes longer to generate the code.

Aside from the big marketing play, Claude not being able to easily generate zig code was probably a big motivator - it doesn’t make anthropic look good and it doesn’t fit into how they’re doing things

Also, you’re assuming that actual traditional maintainers even exist now. Likely it’s a smaller team of people running mythos agents with an unlimited budget and no real need to fully understand the code

Re: Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

#604

Post by thearrow »

cwyers wrote: post #580
andrepd wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The codebase is otherwise largely the same. The same architecture, the same data structures. How can you possibly verify this, if a 1M line patch was written over 7 days? It's at best a hunch (vibes?), and at worst a lie.

Because it passes the existing test suite? And he knows what's in the test suite?

The test suite explicitly verifies the architecture and the data structures used? Depends on the suite, I suppose.

Re: Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

#605

Post by noelsusman »

Tesl wrote: post #539
tasuki wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, nine days ago[0]: > 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. Maybe... it wasn't such an overreaction? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

I'm really out the loop here so maybe you can help answer me a question - why is HN unhappy about this rewrite? why are people writing here almost as if they feel betrayed by Bun being rewritten from Zig into Rust? I genuinely don't get it. I've been following this Bun stuff a bit but I don't understand where the HN sentiment is coming from.

Vibe coding a Rust rewrite of a widely used tool is basically catnip for the HN crowd.

Re: Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

#606

Post by sigmar »

Tesl wrote: post #539
tasuki wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, nine days ago[0]: > 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. Maybe... it wasn't such an overreaction? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

I'm really out the loop here so maybe you can help answer me a question - why is HN unhappy about this rewrite? why are people writing here almost as if they feel betrayed by Bun being rewritten from Zig into Rust? I genuinely don't get it. I've been following this Bun stuff a bit but I don't understand where the HN sentiment is coming from.

posting my read (since it differs so much from the others')- there's a 'holy war' being waged by people that think LLMs shouldn't do full rewrites of software. There are various reasons people think this (think LLMs are parrots that make slop and are incapable of writing good code, have environmental concerns, or are angry that software licenses can be circumvented). I call it a 'holy war' because I think most see our current trajectory as a bit inevitable and have a strong urge to proselytize their views and chide maintainers that use LLMs in ways they don't like.

Very similar angry comments happened with the discussions of the Chardet rewrite, next.js/vinext, and JSONata/gnata if you want to look at this in context.

Re: Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

#607

Post by dlopes7 »

Jarred wrote: post #76

Still writing the blog post about this. Will share more details. For where this is coming from, skim the bugfixes in the Bun v1.3.14 and earlier release notes. Rust won’t catch all of these - leaks from holding references too long and anything that re-enters across the JS boundary are still on us. But a large % of that list is use-after-free, double-free, and forgot-to-free-on-error-path, which become compile errors…

I bet the blog post will make no mention of pressure from anthropic to do this and instead will celebrate the fact that “it passes all tests”, of course omitting how many tests were modified to forcibly pass

Re: Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

#608

Post by rglover »

preommr wrote: post #111
tkel wrote: post #4

Turns out "its just an experiment, you all are overreacting" was just a lie to damp criticism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

Well I've got egg on my face. I am in that post, defending bun. I thought for sure the peanut gallery was overreacting. Especially when the concern was absurd - because who would do such an insance thing? Like, at the time I legitimately thought 'no way a project switches over in a few months'. Even as an absurd hypothetical, I couldn't even imagine the prospect of it being done in a matter of days. Feeling really co…

> Well I've got egg on my face.

Not at all. Supporting a methodical conversion to Rust seems reasonable. How could you have predicted they'd shotgun it?

Re: Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

#609

Post by vickychijwani »

Tesl wrote: post #539
tasuki wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, nine days ago[0]: > 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. Maybe... it wasn't such an overreaction? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

I'm really out the loop here so maybe you can help answer me a question - why is HN unhappy about this rewrite? why are people writing here almost as if they feel betrayed by Bun being rewritten from Zig into Rust? I genuinely don't get it. I've been following this Bun stuff a bit but I don't understand where the HN sentiment is coming from.

The unhappiness is primarily stemming from Bun’s ownership by Anthropic - HN sees this as Anthropic using an OSS project for reckless marketing stunts.

For the record I don’t believe it’s a stunt, it’s ridiculous to me - everyone’s just seeing what they want to see out of sheer hate for anything Anthropic does.

In any case if the rewrite is really as reckless as many in this thread claim, we will see Bun collapse in on itself with a 1M LOC codebase the core team doesn’t understand, or rollback to Zig. So we don’t need to have a flamewar over it, time will answer the question.

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