My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
andrewkelley.me
My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
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Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
#2I was wrong to be upset this whole time that the rewrite would hurt Zig. This is one of those rare occasions when I’m glad I was wrong. Interesting insights.
Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
#3I read the post and roughly summarized it as:
1.It felt uncomfortable that Bun was presented as a representative example of Zig. From the internal Zig perspective, it looked more like a bad example of how to use Zig.
2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide.
3.I(OP,andrewkelly) don't think badly of Jarred as a person, but after signing a contract with VC, the management side has been poor.
4.The Bun documentation looked like marketing.
5.Bad contributions driven by AI came through indirect promotion of Bun, which attracted interest from people after it was acquired by Antropic.
I understand that it's burdensome to see Bun as Zig's representative success story, and I get the wish not to see Rust rewrites through a lens of language superiority. But on the flip side, I'm not sure I would have ever learned about Zig if not for Bun.
While the criticism is valid, I also understand Bun's position. After all, Antropic's acquisition of Bun was ultimately about showing that even a 'new language' can be used effectively with AI, and that's precisely where the friction arose.
I think the refusal to accept AI from a purely human programmer perspective is a matter of personal values, and I find the Zig team admirable on a human level. (Though I'm an active proponent of AI, so my view differs.)
Both sides have valid points, but sometimes I wish someone would turn the emotional and political dynamics of open source into a novel. I think it would be fascinating
Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
#4It feels like the first half of blog post is less of "thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite" and more "I don't like Jarred, he's a bad programmer and manager".
Maybe I'm wrong, but it strongly feels this way. I'm not saying that Andrew is right or wrong, it's just that you could throw out most of the first half of the post and not lose anything actually on topic.
> But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset, and he took venture capital.
> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
#5I read the post and roughly summarized it as: 1.It felt uncomfortable that Bun was presented as a representative example of Zig. From the internal Zig perspective, it looked more like a bad example of how to use Zig. 2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide. 3.I(OP,andrewkelly) don't think badly of Jarred as a person, but after signing a co…
*Ben
Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
#6> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred
The whole post felt like a personal criticism of Jarred.
Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
#7I read the post and roughly summarized it as: 1.It felt uncomfortable that Bun was presented as a representative example of Zig. From the internal Zig perspective, it looked more like a bad example of how to use Zig. 2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide. 3.I(OP,andrewkelly) don't think badly of Jarred as a person, but after signing a co…
*Ben
Sorry. Sometimes I can't remember the English spelling. Thanks for the correction. i've fixed it
Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
#8> he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards.
That sounds completely surreal. Is Bun really used that much?
Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
#9> The main problem, however, was code quality.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
Perhaps the amount of bugs comes from using a C-like language that requires meticulous manual care to avoid writing runtime bugs.
Even C++ would be a safer choice because of RAII.
When you have to dedicate significant resources to avoid/fix runtime issues that are made impossible at compile time by other languages, the programmer isn't entirely at fault.
Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
#10> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred The whole post felt like a personal criticism of Jarred.
I'd consider the opinions professional criticisms of Jarred. While focused on him individually I don't think they are very personal