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My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

andrewkelley.me

401–410 of 757 posts

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can call it superficiality but there are just some of us who believe that treating people right is the core of this. You're viewing that as some kind of superficial virtue signaling but if we're not treating people with respect then there's not a point in doing any of this, it gets to the very thing that Kelley is complaining about.

[flagged]

It's not about kid gloves. There is a ways of reponing to this which isn't this ugly. That's part of being a leader.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#402
Yikes, the majority of this blog post is saying basically "skill issue" and "Jarred bad engineer", but I think that hurts Zig far more than Andrew realises.

If Bun, a disaster of engineering apparently, simply just switches to Rust and all of their issues magically disappear... then the Rust Vs Zig war is over before it started right?

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#403
post #260

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…

you are right, to many people feel far to comfortable writing like this. but my reaction is to double down and be more active to counter this kind of expression and make it clear that this is not welcome. it worked with linus torvalds.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying your only singular experience with the Zig community is this one blogpost, and you've written 14 comments so far on here about it? What are you even gaining here?

I've been using Zig for years. Is this not a discussion forum?

My apologies, your previous comment read to me as "I have engaged, I just read this blog post". I now see what you intended.

I've realised from the comments under this post that many people seem to desire some sort of performative "professional" communication style from people above all else. I don't know why people care about this so much and I don't think I care to know.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#405

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. 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 star…

> 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.

All of what you say may be true, but the point remains: the Bun project lead can do whatever the hell he wants with his own project. There is no objectively "right" path here, in a moral sense.

People are allowed to rewrite their own software whenever they want to for whatever reasons they want, people are allowed to be "stinky managers" (Andrew's words), people are allowed to only hire people who want to work 7 days a week, people are allowed to only work on things that interest them, people are allowed to write crappy, hacky code in their project.

What business is it of Zig's that Jarred is (apparently, secondhand) a "stinky manager"? What business is it of Zig's that Jarred wants to run his own company the way he wants to?

Going after the guy's character after he decided he wanted to go a different direction is _incredibly_ petty.

It's so easy to deal with this like a professional: "Zig and Bun are no longer affiliated. I thank Jarred for his contributions to Zig over the years and wish him and the Bun project the best." or some variant of that. Bland and corporate, but who cares? It's done. Move on. Save the grousing for the DMs, keep on attracting new contributors, avoid alienating bystanders/potential contributors, build your project.

This post does nothing to burnish the reputation of the Zig project or its leadership, and in fact has the opposite effect. The message from the top is apparently "it's fine to be petty and vindictive".

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#406
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…

Not sure I follow. Is "fuzzing their Zig code" somehow related to adding a Fuzzilli integration to Bun?

Yes, "their" refers to Bun's code, not the Zig compiler's code. Fuzzili is a fuzzing engine for JavaScript, so integrating it into Bun means that Fuzzili is fuzzing Bun.[0]

From the Bun post[1]

> We fuzz Bun's runtime APIs 24/7 using Fuzzilli, the JavaScript engine fuzzer used by V8 & JavaScriptCore

From Andrew Kelley's post today[2]:

> 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.

Sumner says that the Bun team has been fuzzing Bun's Zig code. Kelley says that this is a fabrication. Sumner showed proof that the Bun team has been fuzzing Bun's Zig code.

It looks like Kelley is incorrect and made an unfounded claim. The generous interpretation is that at the time Kelley and Sumner had a more collaborative relationship, Sumner was not fuzzing Bun's Zig code, but I'd expect Kelley to check if anything had changed since then before publicly accusing Sumner of lying in this week's Bun blog post.

[0] https://github.com/googleprojectzero/fuzzilli

[1] https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust

[2] https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? If I told you to your face "you are shitty at your job" you don't see that as a personal attack?

Sure, but getting a bad perf review then, is that necessarily a personal attack? Andrew and Jarred and I are all peers in this situation. You get reviews from your peers.

I don't understand, why isn't your attention focused on the claim that Jarred lies in professional settings and in public? Jarred himself shows up to post receipts with barely any commentary, showing where the focus is.

Anyways, what do you think about Jarred? Do you think he lies about Andrew in public? What was the term Andrew used? Outright fabrication?

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#408

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 almost completely disagree. Unprofessional? Maybe a little, but honest, and while the truth isn't flattering to Jarred, I'd say generally kind. Embarrassing? Not from my seat. Andrew is just revealing the relationship dynamics between a principled programming language developers and pragmatic business users of that language. I had already inferred a bunch that this post confirms based on the agentic port from forke…

> I'd say generally kind.

How is saying someone wrote “slop” and is stinky kind?

I can’t understand these comments that claim the article was generally kind, unless you and I read different articles with different words.

I legitimately had to go back and check that the article hadn’t been edited to remove some of the ad hominems

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#409

There are astute comments about the post's tone elsewhere in this thread[0] But this killed my hopes for Zig. The drama is fun, and Andrew is maybe even admirable in his earnest, but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project. I know that's boring and uninspired, but that's what I want my tech stack and it's management to be. Also, maybe Jarred was a net negative, but bun was also a real…

> but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project. Yes, I think you are totally right. I'm sure Linux would never be so big as it is without a maintainer that talks so professional than Linus Torvalds.

linus torvalds was eventually told that his tone was not acceptable and that he needed to learn to tone it down. linux grew despite linus tone, not because of it.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#410

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.

As someone from a cultural background that is considered very direct and blunt, I can say that there is a rather fine line between being direct and being an asshole.

This post devolves into a personal attack one sentence in. There was no reason to go into Jared's life at all to begin with. The entire post doesn't need to exist at all if you're confident that Bun leaving will have zero or even positive impact. Why turn an already negative event of a slop rewrite into drama? It's petty and immature.

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