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My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

andrewkelley.me

141–150 of 757 posts

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#141
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. > Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs

Ufff, the creator of zig saying that the biggest zig project is slop was definitly not on my bingo card.

Its sad to see that on of the biggest projects was more or less badly written zig code. On that note, I wonder which big project have good zig code?

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#142
post #104
post #93

> You can imagine how we might want to put some social distance between ourselves and a project whose irresponsible software engineering practices invite the exact kind of criticism that people are eager to level. The other (very salient) points notwithstanding, I'm afraid this quote shows that Zig hasn't learned a lesson that other languages of its generation (and older) have: if a project's memory safety depends on…

I’m reminded of the hierarchy of controls in machine safety. If you can’t eliminate the hazard, or substitute a less hazardous thing, then engineering out the hazard (like Rust did) is preferable to a procedural control (“git gud at engineering”).

C/C++ does not care and they’re currently the language for foundational work (OS, platforms, and libraries). Python and Java does not care, they will just throw runtime exceptions and crash. Rust care, but they don’t play well with the rest of the world.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#143
post #26

Zig is getting that Elm, etc vibe. Genius/visionary BFDL who's also personally incapable of leading the project towards healthy long-term viability. Say what you will about Matz or José Valim, I don't think they'd ever write a "and don't let the door hit you on the way out" screed full of personal attacks ("stinky manager", "writing slop", "a total shit show") against a person who led a very prominent project and fin…

Other people (not meaning this about you) very frequently seem to throw around the BFDL acronym uncritically without remembering or caring that Benevolent is the first word in there.

This blog post is mostly made up of pettiness and is not an isolated incident - he is often pretty "spicy" or downright hostile in comments sections when making an appearance.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#144
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The second thing is not an ad hominem, it's talking about what he did or how he did it, not who he is.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#145
post #87
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.

I find this sad, as I use Bun as a Node.js replacement that works really well. I wanted improved builds times and run speed. Both things bun provided. It reduced ram usage and worked with the node ecosystem well.

So for some workflows it looked like a flat improvement on all parts.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#146
post #31

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.

If you are writing in C-like codebase and aren't tracking lifetimes and ownership at least as well as a borrow checker you're opening yourself to CVEs.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#147
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

Part of it might feel like ad hominem, but I think the bluntness is justified in this case. It provides some pretty important context on the situation.

As an outside observer who knew little about Zig and Bun, the impression I got is that the rewrite came out of nowhere, and that the Zig community was surprised by it. The post makes it quite clear that this wasn't the case, and describes how the actions and overall mentality of Bun's creator already suggested such a thing was likely to happen, straight from the mouth of someone who worked with him and isn't afraid to voice his thoughts. Not everything needs to be PR speak.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.

Do you have bias? I'm not saying I don't have some hidden bias but I have no skin in the game. I don't use Bun or Zig or plan to. My reflection comes after reading Jarred's post yesterday, which I found interesting, and then Andrew's today. I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone and the summary is: > The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor an…

Uhm, I'm very confused by the last part of your comment. You put it into an LLM to...understand the tone? Is that supposed to convince me of something?

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#149

This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig. I know very little about Jared but his article yesterday, which I read, seemed appreciative of Zig. I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them. This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product. It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look chil…

I don't think it's too bad, but I also don't think it's good.

I also don't think Andrew can claim at the end "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" when the post includes the sentence "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs".

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#150
post #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?

That is a 100% on point analysis, there was a lot of hype around Bun since the beginning when it was an invite only project. Arguably that same interest is what got Jarred VC funding in the first place. Note that usage and public interest are not the same quantity, people also care about the potential of a project.

A project getting hype does not mean that same project could sustain itself through crowdfunding.
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