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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

#551

Post by krupan »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #493
conartist6 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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!

Ok, then call out those aspects. Don’t call the lead a stinky manager who wrote shitty code. Criticize the project and methodology, not the person.

Management style and code quality outputs are not criticisms of the person, they are judgements of the person's management skills and coding skills. Are we not allowed to do that? Or do we just need to use nicer language when doing it? I could agree with nicer language, but those were actually very relevant facts that were missing in the original blog post about the rewrite.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#552

Post by krupan »

xlii wrote: post #459
vitorfblima wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite confused by this. Is calling someone a "stinky manager" a personal attack? It's funny that we can't differentiate the person from his "job". I work with some shitty managers, but I don't hold it against them on a personal level...

Word-engineer hat on: > The grapevine was (...), and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Per exact words these two are different: - I think someone is stinky - I spoke with people who said someone is stinky i.e. I might myself not share the sentinment, or not know anything about it, or simply not engage - relay is not an opinion in itself.

You got it wrong.

- I think someone is stinky at this one particular thing

- I spoke with people who said he was stinky at this one particular thing

Those are different than personal attacks

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#553

Post by bel8 »

27183 wrote: post #297
preommr wrote: post #121

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…

> And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language. Would you argue that Chez Scheme (to pick a random example) isn't a "serious programming language"? And I am sorry, but the assumption that "explosive growth" in the venture capital sense is somehow necessary for "success" is cancer.

> Would you argue that Chez Scheme (to pick a random example) isn't a "serious programming language"?

Commercially speaking? Absolutely not a "serious programming language" in this context.

If someone tries to implement a project using Chez Scheme, they better have agreat reason to not use mainstream boring language.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#554

Post by jtmarmon »

f311a wrote: post #140
hazn wrote: post #39

Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack. Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance: 1) It's hardcore Anti-AI 2) It's moved to Codeberg 3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselve…

They don't have a goal of becoming a popular language, though and will continue to work on it as long as there are donations. They don't care about being mainstream and there are niche companies who appreciate Zig and donate.

> I'm hustling. I'm playing the game. I'm doing what it takes to make this thing mainstream and a viable, practical choice for individuals and companies. If you talk shit about Zig in public, I'm going to fight back. But I respect you. I see you. I understand you. I don't hate you. I would literally buy you a drink.

Andrew Kelley - An Open Letter to Everyone I've Butted Heads With (2025 Aug 29) https://andrewkelley.me/post/open-letter-everyone-butted-hea...

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#555

Post by krupan »

bloody-crow wrote: post #485
manish_gill wrote: post #355

Why are we so eager to dismiss the very personal experiences of Andrew - someone who envisioned and developed Zig from the ground up? It is entirely within the realm of possibility that what he describes here did transpire. He had bad experiences with one of the more popular projects within the ecosystem - something that he hoped would become successful but the incentives were clearly misaligned. When in doubt - look…

> But things like taste and quality matter. And I trust the creator of Zig more than the creator of Bun when it comes to said taste. Having read both articles I'm in the opposite corner. I found Andrew's personal ad-hominem filled emotional post distasteful and Jarred's purely technical and filled with praise of Zig well written and in good taste.

But it wasn't full of praise for Zig. It specifically pointed out that his project written in zig was full of memory safety bugs, and said that there was no way to get around that if the project stayed with zig. It's ludicrous!

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#557

Post by crabmusket »

sph wrote: post #467
vopi wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re telling me you would be as likely to contribute to a project hosted in CVS as compared to git (and on GitHub)?

No, but making a codeberg account, seemingly the second most popular forge in the world, is not that huge effort.

> second most popular forge in the world

This is absolutely brutal to GitLab

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#558

Post by krupan »

nemothekid wrote: post #522

> There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. You're not giving TigerBeetle nearly enough credit. In a post-Rust world I really don't like the rebuttal for eschewing memory-safety is alway…

I've chased down plenty of esoteric bugs in my career and memory safety ones were usually the easiest. There are tools like valgrind, address sanitizer, etc. that help with those, or, like you said, there are memory safe languages (any interpreted language, for example). I've dealt with even harder to find bugs from things such as:

- misunderstood specifications

- missing else clause to an if statement

- wires with the insulation rubbed off in an embedded system with a mechanical design flaw

- accidental endless loops starving all other tasks

- priority inversion

- string encoding problems

- byte order problems

- etc., etc.

From everything I've read now about this bun project, I won't be surprised to hear that it continues to have lots of bugs even after this rewrite to rust

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#559

Post by nicce »

nickmonad wrote: post #510
carllerche wrote: post #380

Sounds like Andrew is using the same argument as Bjarne Stroustrup: if you use it right, you don't write bugs. It hasn't really worked out for C++.

He's not. > "There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. You're not giving TigerBeetle nearly enough credit. Quite simply they put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an…

But is TigerBeetle then even reasonable reference as an argument for Zig? Maybe they could have reached the same with plain C.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#560

Post by krupan »

mcdow wrote: post #520

“no open source project will succeed with this level of unprofessionalism” y’all clearly are not acquainted with some of the things Linus has said on the LKML

Or the systemd guys, or the OpenBSD guys, or the GNU guys, or the Open Source guys, or the Oracle guy, or the Apple guy, or the Microsoft guys, or just about any leader of a big project/corporation
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