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My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

andrewkelley.me

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Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#71

Post by rvz »

This is quite an interesting read from Andrew's perspective. But one line tells me everything I needed to know.

> The blog post is expertly written. It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article.

Even Andrew knew that this was going to be Anthropic's marketing opportunity for AI to rewrite Bun from Zig into Rust. This post from Jarred says it all. [0] If you have access to hundreds of billions worth of resources (infinite tokens and compute), they don't care what others think and some relationships are just cheap to discard.

Like I said before in [1] and [2], Bun (now Anthropic) does not care about you. They did this to market the capabilities of their AI models and this rewrite was an example of that in broad daylight. Even if Zig allowed AI generated contributions, this move was going to happen anyway.

I cannot believe that many commenters in [0] at the time did not see that this rewrite was eventually going to happen.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48240829

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073893

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#72

Post by cyber1 »

andrepd wrote: post #64
cyber1 wrote: post #14

To me, this whole effort of rewriting Bun from Zig to Rust looks like a big marketing move. The question is: if Anthropic AI is really that powerful, why not just fix the bugs and give it the more ambitious task of redesigning the existing Bun Zig codebase in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future?

Static guarantees are better than stochastic parrots. A static linger beats telling Claude "check this idiom". Etc etc.

[dead]

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#73

Post by dminik »

hazn wrote: post #39

Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack. Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance: 1) It's hardcore Anti-AI 2) It's moved to Codeberg 3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselve…

I also think Zig has a rough road ahead, but not because of AI or moving to codeberg. No, it's because Andrew isn't really a BDFL. He's at best a DFL. The project is already mostly closed off to external contributors.

It kind of reminds me of Elm in a way. Though I'm not expecting 6 years of drought just yet.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#74

Post by dnoberon »

Not sure a personal attack against Jarred really helps the case for using Zig. He could have and should have focused on the language and not “a stinky manager”. Honestly, this makes me want to steer clear of Andrew as much as Jarred.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#75

Post by alfiedotwtf »

jdw64 wrote: post #3

I 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…

Not accepting a PR because it was purely written by AI is like saying PRs will only be accepted if the developer used a standing desk for more than 75% of the time during the code's creation. In the end, as long as the code is not shit, who cares how the sausage was made!

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#76

Post by sarreph »

embedding-shape wrote: post #57
sarreph wrote: post #50

It's hard, in my opinion, to lend credence to the author here when they decided to devote the first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem. Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig! I've been keen to pick Zig up recently due to mitchellh's evangelism and inspiring writing on the subject. This article puts me off learning Zig.

> first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem. Seems you're not alone in feeling this, mind quoting the exact and verbatim parts that seem like "speculative ad hominem"? I see there are quite a bits about how Andrew sees Jarred and his workflow/work mentality, but I'm not sure I see clearly what is supposed to be the ad hominem, speculative or not.

Sure:

> he was essentially groomed from a young age

> It's one thing to choose a poor work-life balance for oneself; a different thing entirely to demand it of others

> Jarred was a stinky manager

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#77

Post by bbg2401 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #23

Anyone who would write an article like this is much more distasteful to me than anything Jarred did.

Jared has behaved appallingly in recent months. Comments about locking out humans from open source code contributions and the gaslighting at the start of the migration are top of mind.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#78

Post by masklinn »

cyber1 wrote: post #31
Tiberium wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Rust is exactly the tooling that gives humans and LLMs a lot of those checks for free, and things like RAII.

If you use Rust the way it was designed to be used, rather than relying on countless "unsafe" blocks, you need to redesign the entire codebase architecture to make it compatible with the borrow checker rules.

Even if you “rely on countless unsafe blocks”, unsafe is additive, it gives access to additional APIs which are not checked. It does not disable affine types, the borrow checker, or send/sync traits. Unless the entire codebase is unsafe (e.g. fresh out of c2rust) it’s very hard to not have more guarantees.

And because unsafe is generally highly local or localizable reasoning (conventionally backed by safety justifications) it really is quite reasonable to go plugging at it, or task an AI within that.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#79

Post by morningsam »

nilirl wrote: post #6

> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred The whole post felt like a personal criticism of Jarred.

And literally 3 sentences later he goes back to insulting him ("productivity fantasy fever dream"). Even if that is true, it's still an unwise post to publish in this form IMHO. If the goal was to defend Zig, that could've been done in a less personal manner.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#80

Post by orangeisthe »

hazn wrote: post #39

Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack. Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance: 1) It's hardcore Anti-AI 2) It's moved to Codeberg 3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselve…

what's the problem in moving to codeberg?
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