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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

#251

Post by ModernMech »

lkey wrote: post #156
dnoberon wrote: post #74

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.

Its an attack an Jarred's public, (un)professional behaviour. One most of us in the community have born witness too in recent months. "Jarred, in his professional capacity, drove away many from our community, and we'd prefer to disassociate." is not 'Jarred is a bad person, privately'. Now, in these circles, that might as well be the same thing, given how little personal life I imagine most VCs have left outside of w…

I think he’s being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person’s character. I say this as someone who before this day regarded Kelley as a role model. Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character. Don’t blame “unmasked neurodivergence” for this, plenty of neurodivergent people can communicate effectively and professionally to a wide audience without attacking someone’s professional character.

For example, given the number of claims made here there’s very little actual evidence and support. Kelley says Jared is a bad manager and credits rumors. He says he writes slop code and doesn’t provide a single example or prove that statement. If this were his “neurodivergence” coming through I’d expect more thorough argument and less “stinky manager” grade school insults.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#252

Post by conartist6 »

jdw64 wrote: post #234
conartist6 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just in the past, and my anger isn't just about what was taken, but the community-destroying use it is being put to: Andrew's job isn't to make a JS runtime, it's to sell the idea that coding is dead. When he made it his job to sell that narrative, he declared war on me. It should not surprise him or anyone else that I am going to take the war right back to his doorstep.

There are some points I understand rationally but find hard to agree with emotionally. What I understand rationally is the claim that AI is destroying your garden and community. It's an undeniable fact that intellectual property and the associated disruption are happening. That's simply true. But what I find hard to agree with emotionally is that personal attacks aren't always justified just because of that. I've als…

Again just to make the nuance clear: nothing I've built has been destroyed. What makes me red hot angry is the message that there's nothing left to build -- that the world will soon belong to the people who just mindlessly copy (Jarred and his ilk). They have been quite crystal clear in their message to me: not using AI makes me worthless garbage to be taken to curb, a snack for anyone using AI.

You see how many times people can tell YOU that you are worthless garbage before you start thinking, "I'm going to punch back at the people who punch me." 20? 50? 100 times you get punched in the face before you start to consider self-defense? Cause I've read that piss-poor message 50 times: "you will be replaced."

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#253

Post by krater23 »

tuckwat wrote: post #101

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…

Before the post I didn't know what zig and bun is. I needed a llm to explain it to me. Now I think about trying Zig. So, no, I don't think it's childish. It reads like a engineer that knows which kind of people you don't need in your environment. I can feel every word he wrote because I know this situations.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#254

Post by afavour »

tuckwat wrote: post #101

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…

> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig

I'm not sure that's his aim here. I imagine he has been asked dozens of times what he thinks about the switch, what it means for Zig, etc. etc. and wanted to just address it one time, which is understandable.

The tone is... strong. I think repeating grapevine rumours about Jarred's management skills adds very little and probably could have been removed. But at its heart I see this post as example of a common clash: open source code hackers vs Silicon Valley "growth hackers".

Kelley is disappointed that a promising Zig project took VC money and went from his passion project's prime example to one that shit talked it on the way out. I get why he's emotional. I wouldn't have written it the way he did but I also don't think policing tone is beneficial for honest communication.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#255

Post by geraneum »

andrew_ wrote: post #109
dwdz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sole reason for that rewrite was Zig creator announcing he won't be accepting AI contributions. It hurt Anthropic's feelings.

Conversely we have actual evidence of Bun rewriting in Rust because Andrew wouldn't accept AI contributions, actually hurt Andrew's feelings.

Not really. It seems like the Rust rewrite blog post triggered this. Which, even though I don’t agree with the tone, seems to be valid criticism.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#256

Post by tialaramex »

ptx wrote: post #191
0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory safety problems are still possible in the new Rust Bun: At the time of writing, about 4% of Bun's Rust code sits inside an unsafe block (~13,000 unsafe keywords across ~27,000 lines / ~780,000 lines), and 78% of those blocks are a single line — a pointer that came from C++, or one call into a C library.

> 78% of those blocks are a single line — a pointer that came from C++, or one call into a C library Don't those blocks need some additional lines for error checking to prevent the unsafety from spreading to the safe code?

It depends

Suppose there's a C library libape which implements monkeys you need in your software. There's a C API where we pass a pointer to a valid monkey and a 32-bit unsigned integer which controls how delicious bananas are. Any 32-bit unsigned integer is valid here, except zero because monkeys always think bananas are at least somewhat delicious, and there's no return value.

Our Rust wrapper probably has Monkey as a type, wrapping one of those valid monkey pointers we mentioned, and so our wrapper for that API call is some unsafe code which just calls the C with this monkey pointer and a non-zero unsigned 32-bit integer which in Rust is just the type NonZeroU32 and we're done. That's a single line, the unsafety checking was all done in Rust's type system, every Monkey has a valid monkey pointer, every NonZeroU32 is (as its name suggests) a non-zero unsigned 32-bit integer.

Now on the other hand, maybe we're wrapping code which takes a char * pointer intended to point at some zero terminated ISO-8859-1 encoded text. That Rust wrapper would be responsible for this translation and maybe you do that work in the wrapper function. But, if you had sixty calls like that, probably you make a Rust type for this problem named like Iso8859dash1Text and then those unsafe calls don't have a lot of boilerplate because all that boilerplate (which is probably even safe Rust depending on how exactly you do it) lives in this Iso8859dash1Text type you made. And that's also a useful model if later you discover the C library lied and it's not ISO-8859-1 it's really Windows Codepage 1252 ...

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#257

Post by Aurornis »

Havoc wrote: post #82

> 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 u…

It’s an inconsistent statement to make when the rest of the article contains ad hominem attacks like these:

> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.

> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.

This is a weirdly childish post. I enjoy a good post where someone speaks their mind without running it through the corporate speak filter first, but it also gives you insights into how a person thinks and operates. With good leadership you can strip away the corporate filter and the result is still professional, but this article reveals something much less than professional

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#258

Post by afavour »

daishi55 wrote: post #89
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

It isn't. The grapevine stuff was unnecessary and should have been cut out but there is plenty of concrete stuff in there as well.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#259

Post by geraneum »

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…

You have to put similar amount of resources when writing in Rust as well. With the difference that it’s more front loaded. Personally I’m a fan of Rust’s approach but the price for having bug free code has to be paid, regardless, one way or the other.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#260

Post by dom96 »

tuckwat wrote: post #101

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…

Agreed. This article should have stuck to the cold facts, rather than a series of personal criticisms that you wouldn’t see written out in the workplace.

Sadly there are far too many open source developers out there who are far too comfortable writing like this. It’s one reason I have stopped being active in open source. You would be fired (or at least disciplined) from any reasonable workplace if you acted like this.

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