Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

andrewkelley.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 757 posts

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#371

Post by 27183 »

em-bee wrote: post #363
27183 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

he doesn't owe it, but his writing reflects on him and the project. personal blog or not, the writing shows his personality, and that in turn affects how comfortable i am using a project led by this person. if this was just one of many zig developers then it would not matter as much, but as this is the founder and leader, his personality has a major impact on the project as whole. especially in how it attracts contri…

Maybe it's just filtering for the right contributors? More isn't always better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#372

Post by classicposter »

I recall an instance where he mocked the project as "Microslop" on his blog and then quietly edited the post later. That aside, the earlier rewrite from TypeScript to Go involved efforts to minimize regressions as much as possible—such as announcements to users and the community, and a phased, one-on-one migration. This project, however, is a different story. It becomes from a buggy product to an entire slop product.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#373

Post by mjr00 »

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…

> This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig.

It is. It's also why Anthropic and Bun moved off Zig.

Zig is effectively a one-man show, and that one man has been making increasingly erratic decisions.

It's his project so it's well within his rights, of course. But when you're a ~trillion dollar company you don't want to get hit by a supply chain risk like this.

For Anthropic, it's better to nip this in the bud rather than invest more into the Zig ecosystem, where there's a demonstrated risk of the not-so-BDFL going off the rails.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#374

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dataflow wrote: post #189
lins1909 wrote: post #125

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.

> 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. I know nothing about the drama here other than what's in the blog post, but these feel more like unnecessarily public personal attacks which don't really reflect well: - a stinky manager. Poor com…

I also know nothing of the drama, but what I picked up from the first blog post was that even with access to near unlimited funds and unreleased god-tier coding llms from a trillion dollar AI corporation it was apparently impossible to fix a backlog of bugs in Zig code but it was possible to fix them by automatically doing a rewrite in rust.

I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is.

So pointing out that the zig code was full of bugs because the author was doing weird stuff and ignoring advice, couldn't hire/retain any good Zig devs because he mismanaged people and is the kind of guy to do a full rewrite because that's more interesting than fixing bugs or learning the old tools feels like stuff he'd want out there in the public domain.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#375

Post by em-bee »

27183 wrote: post #320
orangedog wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to if you give a shit about the community you are leading, yes. You're not operating as a private figure in that role, everything you do affects the community and it is blind or selfish to act otherwise.

This is so deeply wrong . This person owes you nothing . You're accusing them of "selfishness" after they've given away thousands of hours of their time... Your entitlement is just breathtaking.

giving away thousands of hours of work does not entitle you to be abusive to your users and contributors. i am entitled to walk away from your project if i don't like your tone.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#376

Post by miyoji »

roetlich wrote: post #170
grahar64 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you are using that right. Saying someone is bringing a bad vibe to your project, as the point he has a bad vibe is just stating the conclusion. Like if someone calls you a bad programmer and doesn't hire you as a programmer, isn't ad hominem

No, the discussion started with a the article from Bun, stating that rust has some technical advantages for them. The response from the Zig creator is a bunch of personal attacks directed at one guy, like calling him a stinky manager. All of these are fully unrelated to which language is better for Bun. This is like the textbook definition of an ad hominem.

> This is like the textbook definition of an ad hominem.

No, it isn't at all. Ad hominem is only in effect and fallacious when the logic turns on the personal attack. "You're wrong because you're stupid" is ad hominem. "You're wrong and also you're stupid" is impolite, but logically fine.

To clarify, I think that the entire "History" section is unrelated to Andrew's argument, only the "Addressing the Blog Post" section actually contains arguments, and that section doesn't contain the rude comments, it's focused on technical decision-making.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#377

Post by simonw »

embedding-shape wrote: post #341
Jarred wrote: post #274

I have learned so much reading Andrew’s code and as I said in the original post: Bun would never have happened without Zig. > 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. Fuzzilli integration: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24826 Merged PRs fixing issues Fuzzilli found in Bun’s…

[flagged]

You want to see him address being "a stinky manager", having "beginner energy", choosing to take VC as opposed to "a solid living via crowdfunding", or "already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs"?

Those are all opinions where arguing about them isn't going to be productive.

Countering the accusation of "an outright fabrication" on the other hand is worthwhile because it's a claim that can be countered.

If somebody called me a liar for something that demonstrably wasn't a lie I wouldn't let that stand, either.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#378

Post by dwattttt »

dpatterbee wrote: post #365
dwattttt wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a stinky manager ... Just a total shit show" are examples I would reach for to demonstrate someone is not being professional.

I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional. Maybe it's just a cultural difference but where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say. If something's a shit show I'd prefer someone just said it rather than dancing around it with corpo-speak.

> I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional

This is a blog post: it's purely textual, language is the only thing it uses to convey meaning. The words chosen to do so reflect what the author thinks.

> where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say

Yes. What ark is trying to say, via the words he chose, is what's earning him the description of "unprofessional".

He could say every factual thing in the blog post without being unprofessional, he just chose not to.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#379

Post by elktown »

mattstir wrote: post #345
elktown wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's embarrassing being obsessed with good tone to the point that people behaving badly should never be called out for it. The article provides good background into how it got to this point - and it fits well with doing an opportunistic AI rewrite after being acquired by an AI provider.

The argument isn't to avoid calling out "bad" behaviour, it's that you can do so with a professional (or at least not actively childish) tone. Using phrases like "stinky manager" while taking multiple jabs at Jarred's personal and educational background (implying by not going to university he was too stupid to think critically about his path forward) paints a weirdly childish yet elitist viewpoint. The blog post read…

I'm sorry but I honestly think this is just being superficial wanting to push it through some kind of corporate speak filter to be able to stomach it.

> Using phrases like "stinky manager"

I would've used a worse adjective given the WLB tweet etc. Is it just because stinky itself has a childish tone to it rather than something like shitty? Or do one need to reach to somewhat open-ended terms like "questionable" to be palatable?

> implying by not going to university he was too stupid to think critically about his path forward

I read that as emphasizing the Thiel Fellowship part, not the lack of university education.

> I don't interact with Zig or Bun, but I certainly haven't been enticed to try Zig after this.

I'm so tired of "I've never played [game] & have never had any intention to play [game] whatsoever, but given [newfound-grievance] I wont buy it!"-style dismissals - talking about childishness.

Post reply on HN