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My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

andrewkelley.me

721–730 of 757 posts

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#721
post #603

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.

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

My point is that it’s a non-decision. You can use AI later, when the models are better.

In the short term, you can address the anti-AI market.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#722
post #451
post #14

To me, this whole effort of rewriting Bun from Zig to Rust looks like a big marketing move. The question is: if Anthropic AI is really that powerful, why not just fix the bugs and give it the more ambitious task of redesigning the existing Bun Zig codebase in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future?

It is worth noting that before rewriting in Rust, Bun maintained a fork used to accelerate the compilation and informed those who asked that this fork could never be merged due to Zig's zero-LLM policy. A few weeks later, Bun began the Rust rewrite. Although not explicitly stated, I suspect these two events may be related.

As was mentioned countless times here on HN, the fork didn't get merged not because of any no-AI policy but because the Zig maintainers considered it to be of poor quality and were already working on more comprehensive improvements to the compiler which would bring the same (and more) benefits, but without the downsides and quality issues of the fork.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#723

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…

The first rule of Hacker News: never say anything negative about Rust.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, enumerate them.

[flagged]

So you don't have any. And after reading all of Jarred's posts and responses you found that he repeatedly thanked Zig and said he respected Andrew but that, after donating over a hundred thousand dollars to their work, his project had different needs than before and needed to change stack?

Incredible display of bad faith discussion. You should be ashamed.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#725
post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is. If I call your code slop, I'm being professional and courteous. The truth doesn't have a ethical value. Me calling your code slop might feel disrespectful, but it's less disrespectful than trying to pass slop off for your coworkers (or users) to use and deal with. Lying to someone, and allowing someone who's supposedly your friend to ship slop is more disrespectful. If I wrote shitty code, and my friend didn't…

Calling something "slop" is dismissive, vague and not constructive. That's why it's not professional. If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

> If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

You and I must have had very different interactions with the types of people who happily emit slop. For the people I've met who've suggested slop; they don't care about quality, and it has exclusively been a waste of time trying to explain why quality is important.

Calling someone's work slop, if they're willing to engage, might be disrespectful, I agree! But calling someone code/commit slop when they don't give a shit about the quality of their code (as evidenced by the commits they're willing to put their name on) is simply a description of reality. Willingness to engage is shockingly important. I can't think of a more vague response than answering "I don't know why the code is like that, the LLM did it".

I'd also like to assert: giving out slop to other people is more disrespectful, and less professional (professionals don't suggest low quality options). I'm much rather you try to insult my code, than waste my time trying to trick me into accepting low quality work.

And then, speaking personally. I would feel the most disrespected, if you were willing to call my code slop when speaking privately. But wouldn't call it slop to me, or publicly. It's not disrespectful to have a candid conversation; even if it's uncomfortable because someone has different and strong opinions than I do. I'm a big boy, I'm able to handle the honest evaluation of my work from another person without it being instantly being disrespectful to me, just because they used a word I didn't like.

If they were lying, that would be disrespectful.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's leading the community. Not having basic professional does indeed kill them vibe for some of us. When is he going to pile on somebody else he disagrees with?

Zig's community is - bar none - the least toxic programming community I've experienced. People on this website (who have never witnessed a single Zig community interaction) love to read blogposts from afar and come to conclusions this way and that, but if they ever stopped to actually engage with the people involved they'd find out the truth quite easily.

I wrote Zig off years ago after watching Andrew troll and make bad faith arguments. This rant only confirms that was the right call.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#727
post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling something "slop" is dismissive, vague and not constructive. That's why it's not professional. If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

> If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better. You and I must have had very different interactions with the types of people who happily emit slop. For the people I've met who've suggested slop; they don't care about quality, and it has exclusively been a waste of time trying to explain…

Well, the creator of Bun is certainly someone that deserves professionalism.

But even random people you get on GitHub sending you PRs. You shouldn't reject them with "this code is slop". At least say "Cannot accept this. The code quality isn't great" or something to that effect.

But the point is: dismissing real people who are doing real work and spending a lot of effort on something with "that's slop" is very unprofessional.

You are just coming up with scenarios that don't really apply to what happened in this blog post.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#728
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work on a site with millions of users and we use bun...

will you continue using it?

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not concealing your jabs at me very well. This comment reads just like the post lmao, no wonder you enjoyed it

I'm not trying to conceal anything, nor did I say anywhere that I enjoyed the blog post either. With those reading abilities, no wonder the two of us got very different takeaways from the post itself.

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Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So you don't have any. And after reading all of Jarred's posts and responses you found that he repeatedly thanked Zig and said he respected Andrew but that, after donating over a hundred thousand dollars to their work, his project had different needs than before and needed to change stack? Incredible display of bad faith discussion. You should be ashamed.

[flagged]
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