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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

#651

Post by bmacho »

nicce wrote: post #48
whimsicalism wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think they are extremely personal and actually very distinct from professional criticisms.

Can you criticize a project which is mainly contributed and managed by one person without criticizing the same person who does the decisions that cause criticisms?

What about:

> The Zig foundation had a continuing disagreement about how Bun was using Zig (their methods and the resulting code). Other projects that follow the advices of the Zig foundation more closely won't have the same problems Bun had.

Posting this could've been enough to save face.

I find the blogpost super petty, 8-10 untrue, unprovable, unrelated jabs against a person and colleague.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#652

Post by [deleted] »

Tiberium wrote: post #25
cyber1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Bun codebase connected to Zig codebase?

You can't do "redesigning the existing Zig code in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future" without actually changing Zig itself.

[deleted]

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#653

Post by 27183 »

deanCommie wrote: post #621
27183 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look, I get where you're coming from, I do. In the last decade, we've seen rampant abuses and exploitation of open source projects and of maintainers. So much individual good will and generous efforts wasted because of corporate malfeasanse. AND YET . If you "open source" a project, if you actually invest in BUILDING a community, you then become a PART Of that community - with the benefits and obligations that come w…

Yeah I'm not defending the blog post as a great way to build the biggest bestest community. Clearly it isn't. But it's also pretty clear that's not the poster's priority. And that is defensible! They don't owe anyone perfection in community building or any other thing.

If they want to write a maybe slightly unhinged blog post excoriating someone they had an unpleasant time with... that's a choice! It's their choice. I don't think we get to demand a different one. We can agree or disagree with what they said, but we can't demand they say something else.

If you want that kind of power over someone you need to ensnare them in a binding contract. No such contract exists here.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#655

Post by abc42 »

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.

Or perhaps it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations and the people with anti-AI sentiment are called "laggards". If so, their amount will likely be near zero soon.

This has happened thousands of times in human history.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#656

Post by Semkas »

tptacek wrote: post #463
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.

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…

Anthropic's niche is that they're the preferred model for software development currently. So, the reason for them to care about the rewrite is obviously not because they care about Bun's stability, but because it is the largest real-world demonstration of Claude's capabilities.

Every part of this saga has gotten an exceptional amount of attention on HN. HN is ostensibly filled with many people starting software-related companies, ie potential Anthropic customers.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#657

Post by ale »

em-bee wrote: post #414
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...

Is calling someone a "stinky manager" a personal attack? yes!

Stinky manager != stinky person

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#658

Post by ykurtov »

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…

Dude, that PR is on 25th of November 2025 :) Few weeks before Anthropic acquired Bun.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#659

Post by fnands »

krupan wrote: post #555
bloody-crow wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

He never said impossible, just hard.

But how is this news? Memory safety bugs are one of (if not the) main source of bugs in C/C++ and also Zig, and Rust's main claim to fame is that it makes it easy to catch these issues at compile time. I feel his criticisms of Zig are fairly uncontroversial.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#660

Post by rirze »

Tiberium wrote: post #56
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…

To be honest, I'm also leaning this way, especially because of the hardcore anti-AI stance, so much that Zig will close security vulnerability issues on Codeberg if you mention that they were found with LLMs. I don't think that this is a good approach.

To my dismay, a lot of projects with anti-AI sentiment are accepting security patches found with AI. Take a look at `ffmpeg` for example.

The hypocrisy is puzzling.

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