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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

#81

Post by fg137 »

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…

If you bothered to actually learn just a little bit about the Zig project, you'll know that they are doing ok. They never cared about introducing new features at a fast speed, having lots of contributors, or getting corporate sponsorship, if that's not already obvious from the article. In fact, they intentionally keep a distance from all of that to make the project more sustainable and less prone to the whims of corporations.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#82

Post by Havoc »

> Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred

That’s quite a statement to make at the end of a post that seems to contain little else…all just thinly veiled.

Saying someone has „beginner energy“ but reframing it as a faux positive (this person fails and thus learns)

Or saying the grapevine says someone is a „stinky manager“? Basically I’m not saying this person is bad it’s just that I need to bring up on this blog that everyone agrees this person is bad.

All seems to be in very poor taste even if true…

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#83

Post by androiddrew »

bpavuk wrote: post #27

well, for me personally, "the" Zig project is not Bun but Ghostty, and it always has been. yeah, Mitchell is very pro-AI, but he is thoughtful, and he sometimes highlights the difference between Zig's and Ghostty's approaches to LLMs (outright ban vs taming)

Yeah and Andrew Kelley is anti AI for his project because it’s counter to the projects learning goals. I think it’s perfectly fine for a project to determine if AI contributions are accepted. Maybe that means change is slower in that project, maybe that means things are more deliberate too.

OSS projects can survive not being on GitHub, Python was something like 20 years was not on gh. If the service has severe outages and there are alternatives why wouldn’t you move? Most people aren’t contributing to the runtime anyways, they are just using the language.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#84

Post by joshka »

bpavuk wrote: post #27

well, for me personally, "the" Zig project is not Bun but Ghostty, and it always has been. yeah, Mitchell is very pro-AI, but he is thoughtful, and he sometimes highlights the difference between Zig's and Ghostty's approaches to LLMs (outright ban vs taming)

I have a working port of ghostty to rust ... not even kidding

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#85

Post by nicce »

skydhash wrote: post #58
SuperV1234 wrote: post #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 r…

I’ve not seen any languages that does not require meticulous care to avoid runtime bugs. Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.

> Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.

They actually remove certain classes completely. E.g. lifetime ownership in Rust removes all bugs related to the reason why it is in the code syntax (a.k.a. lifetime markers remove use-after-free completely in Rust.)

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#86

Post by delegate »

A better title would be 'My emotions on the Bun Rust Rewrite', since the article feels like an emotional reaction rather than a thoughtful analysis of the situation. Give it some time..

I'm rooting for Zig either way, even though I have nothing against Rust and I don't directly use bun.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#87

Post by fg137 »

asciimoo wrote: post #2

I 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.

I don't think Bun actually matters much, even for web development. For sure there is a lot of enthusiasm, but all the production systems I know continue to use Node.js and are not moving to Bun any time soon. In the "real world" not that many people care about it.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#88

Post by giancarlostoro »

> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.

Interesting I wonder if its something Jarred did locally or something else that was just not widely done by the whole team? I dont like to make bad assumptions about devs or dev teams without first asking. I owe credit to HN for one of the guidelines which states something like do not assume intentional malice in comments, I feel like we assume the worst in general about other devs, but people are imperfect and make mistakes.

That said as others noted this post could have been written a bit differently while still pointing out genuine issues. The ad hominem attacks are a bit unnecessary and add nothing of value to what could have been a better response.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#89

Post by daishi55 »

fwlr wrote: post #69

I found this post very refreshing! I’m sure it would have been very tempting to one-up the “PR-speak” of the Bun post. Likewise, it would have been very tempting to include the same set of facts that reflect negatively on Jarred, while studiously concealing one’s own opinion (eg “I heard people called him a stinky manager. I am not saying that, other people are, but I’m not”). I appreciated that it was just … genuine…

It’s just one long ad hominem

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#90

Post by AlienRobot »

>We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.

I'd like to know what the poor code quality in Bun looks like. Does anybody have concrete examples?

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