511–520 of 757 posts
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.
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Maybe it's just filtering for the right contributors? More isn't always better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, and the kind of contributors you attract with this kind of writing are just assholes
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"An unprofessional embarrassment" is exactly how I feel about Bun. I don't get mad at people for standing up for their morals, I get mad when they have none. AI is an a-moral tech, and Bun is using it in an a-moral way: for team Bun the ends justify any means. I'm on team Zig!
Agree with you. This behaviour by the commentariat here on HN seems more like a reflexive revulsion at the discovering of humans with ideals other than money on this globe. This of course leads to strong internal conflict - it becomes harder to accept yourself not having any morals when confronted by someone pointing it out. Easily resolved by the ego by disparaging the boss of zed instead.
> not having any morals
You don't agree with someone so you claim they have no morals. I don't have words for how stupid this is that anyone can so casually dehumanize someone over something so trivial.
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…
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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…
I think this is the exact point that the article was getting at in the last section. It is okay to not be very good at software engineering or people management! It is useful to know these things if you want to understand why the Bun project made specific technical decisions, but they don't make the people involved "bad people" in a more nebulous moral sense.
The lead developer of Zig is discussing these factors because the main technical decision was moving away from Zig.
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Maybe their concept of fuzzing is different? Jarred commented on the top that they use fuzzilli , which is a javascript engine fuzzer. But zig has a built in integrated fuzzer! Andrew must have been talking about the built in fuzzer because that's what is associated with zig. zig build test --fuzz
The fact that Bun is the face of Zig owes to (1) its popularity in the relatively enormous web ecosystem and (2) that there aren't many winners in Zig. This means Bun leaving and rewriting to Rust, no matter how its phrased by any of the major parties, was always going to be alternatively reframed as one of the few major proponents of Zig leaving for Rust. That's why this is a PR moment for Zig. It's not because Jarr…
I think this is the core problem.
I would rather see something like tigerbeetle become the face of zig, some project that is well written.
There is nothing wrong with Jarred's mentality because it gets the job done, but I would be also angry if I was represented by a project I don't like.
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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.
The points in the article aren't great. It opens up personal and stays personal. As people in this thread have pointed out, several of the falsifiable bits turn out to be false. The big thing though is, you get to the end of it and have to ask: why did this need to be written at all? "It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article." He does get that An…
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…
Andrew means the zig build test --fuzz command probably the built in zig fuzzer, that's the tool that is in his scope.
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> For me, using Fuzzilli for testing a Zig code is not fuzzing, it's integration testing. If you're running code externally (e.g. wrapping binary) you cannot guarantee that side effect isn't caused by IO. I consider fuzzing a low level activity with many external variables removed. I've never heard anyone restrict the definition of "fuzzing" in this way. If I repeatedly generate inputs to a program and then run the p…
> You can argue whether we need the term "transpiler," but a source-to-source compiler is a compiler. That's true today, but compiling was historically was defined as getting source code (human readable) to bytecode (machine runnable without an interpreter). Some people didn't like that definition, and consequently the waters have been murkied. Just like with eg crypto. Or real time.
y’all clearly are not acquainted with some of the things Linus has said on the LKML