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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

#601

Post by tptacek »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #599
tptacek wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unless you're implying that Anthropic is actually threatened by Zig here (???) and perhaps even is working to sabotage it, I could not think of a worse meme to reference. I honestly find your comment confusing.

My point is that Anthropic does not in fact have a lot of money riding on whether or not they use Zig, or probably really anything else that happens with Bun. In the meme, Anthropic is Don Draper, and the author of this blog post is Ginsburg.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#602

Post by nickmonad »

nicce wrote: post #559
nickmonad wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zig still offers a lot of great additions that make systems work more reliable. Optionals and comptime are two helpful things C does not have, and there are plenty others. One of their core devs addressed this in a thread over on Lobsters [1]

> Bounds checks, checked arithmetic, strongly-typed alignment, strongly-typed error codes, tagged unions, explicit undefined are some rather important language features. If Zig didn't exist, TigerBeetle would probably have been written in C, and the safety gap between C and Zig is just gigantic. And safety is one aspect of the language, Zig has a lot of going on for it elsewhere!

[1] https://lobste.rs/s/6rkdik/rewriting_bun_rust#c_8gebpa

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#603

Post by duxup »

neutronicus wrote: post #192
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish. Antirez made a post equivalent to: you'd be a fool not to use AI to increase test coverage. Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage given its adoption and time in development. Their stance on AI is completely childish. They could benefit massively from it, yet refuse to even con…

Childish or no, anti-AI sentiment is ubiquitous and growing. From a PR perspective there’s a lot to gain in the short term by picking the “anti-AI” lane. And you can always change your mind later.

Is popular sentiment a good measure for a decision? Anti lots of things have been growing at some points in history, including bad things.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#604

Post by epestr »

jsnell wrote: post #492
xlii wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Depending on where you are and how you communicate semantics matter more or less. It's very similar to compiler/transpiler. E.g. TypeScript…

My point is that Kelley did not argue that what Bun does isn't really fuzzing. He wrote that the post's claim is a fabrication. But that claim is really specific, and to evaluate whether it is true it doesn't matter what Kelley's unstated definition of fuzzing is. So an argument about definitions doesn't seem super valuable here.

That misses the mark here. Every other Kelley's claim has also been unsourced and not cited. I was able to guess that the integration might've simply been something which happened after they'd once not had it.

Given the lack of due diligence here, it seems Kelley's intentions weren't to be objective potrayal of truth but whatever was most damaging.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#605

Post by quixoticaxolotl »

People claiming Andrew Kelley's remarks in this thread can't possibly be personal attacks surprise and sadden me.

If someone insults your ability to do your job, paints you as an opportunistic sellout, and thanks the stars for your riddance, saying someone shouldn't feel hurt because "we can separate personal from professional lives" says more about your inability to perceive your own hurtfulness than it does of that person's benevolence.

The minimum bar for tactful communication is to be courteous and empathetic. None of this had that.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#606

Post by cheikhcheikh »

0xpgm wrote: post #183
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…

How is it unprofessional when it is simply someone giving their honest personal opinion on an issue that involves something that is valuable to them, on their personal blog nonetheless. Is everyone a walking and talking brand now so that they have to always filter their words, walk on eggshells, hide behind corpo-speak so as to seem 'professional'? More honest discourse is required in today's world, not less. It seem…

Did you actually read it ? "Stinky manager" "alreay writing slop before llm" and nore insults, cmon now...

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#607

Post by audunw »

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…

I have the exact opposite impression. From everything else I’ve seen around Andrew and the Zig Foundation he is extremely professional and skilled with managing community. In fact I’d say the community and management of the project is Zigs biggest strength.

This blog post only reinforces this opinion. It is clear that the Zig developers has had huge issues with his relationship with Bun for a long time, and it seems from both Jarred and Andrew’s post that Andrew really put all those issues aside, in spite of his strong personal opinions, to maintain a professional and productive relationship as long as possible.

It’s only now that the relationship is broken (on Buns initiative) that he has taken the opportunity to vent a bit. And I’m really glad he did.

It’s similar to Linus. Sometimes Linus goes too far in his comments. But getting an occasional insight into people’s personal opinion is good, as long as it’s not at the cost of breaking a professional relationship.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#608

Post by voidhorse »

orangedog wrote: post #305
neutronicus wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Childish or no, anti-AI sentiment is ubiquitous and growing. From a PR perspective there’s a lot to gain in the short term by picking the “anti-AI” lane. And you can always change your mind later.

Surveys show that 60% of US adults don't like it which means 40% either don't care or do. I'd advise not getting your ideas about sentiment towards it from places like HN which are very biased and unrepresentative places of anything. I find the anti crowd increasingly to be hateful and close-minded and it is disappointing because I have a lot of friends in it. There's a moral puritanism which gives people feelings th…

I'm not anti-AI at all but to call people who don't want to use it "moral puritans" is laughable. It's hard to read that as anything other than a self-report on your own extreme nonchalance when it comes to the many ethical thickets surrounding this technology. While the possible benefits of AI in fields like medicine are promising, the concerns that a lot of people have about LLMs and the supporting infrastructure, power shifts, and more that have come along with them are diverse, serious, and completely understandable, and I can't imagine them being "puritan" to anyone other than those ruthlessly driven by nothing but capitalistic self-interest.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#609

Post by ackfoobar »

vopi wrote: post #442
mpalmer wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second thing is not an ad hominem, it's talking about what he did or how he did it, not who he is.

“An Ad hominem refers to when a speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself” It’s definitionally an ad hominem against Jared. If he stuck to why he thought it was bad for Bun to do this, I would be more sympathetic.

> stuck to why he thought it was bad for Bun to do this

Quite the opposite. "When Jarred announced the Rust rewrite, we were ecstatic."

> It’s definitionally an ad hominem against Jared.

Who Jarred is, as a CEO, definitely has an impact on how the company develops software - how Zig is used. And the argument is that Zig is used badly in Bun. Without that context, I, as a reader, would have to actually read through a lot of code to be convinced of that point.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#610

Post by voidhorse »

orangedog wrote: post #310
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.

It is not about good tone it's about not being hateful and rude. Why is this that hard to pick apart? Why do devs believe being rude is somehow a sign of honesty? They are orthogonal. This post needed none of the mean-spirited attacks that it contained to make its points. It is only hurt by the attacks as seen by the focus on "tone" throughout these comments.

What you are asking for is a slippery slope.

The history of humanity is full of biting polemics and attacks on the character of others, just read Voltaire. Sometimes, attacks are deserved.

Yes, a world in which everyone is professional and "plays nice" sounds great but it also quickly becomes a mechanism for suppression of the truth. Not the situation here, but "decorum" expectations are sometimes precisely one of the functions that help bad people maintain power (consider how difficult it can be for minorities or marginalized people to speak truthfully about what's happened to them). Sometimes one person being blunt, honest, and a little rude is a necessary step in clearing ground for others to be more upfront about the bad behavior of individuals.

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