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I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad…
Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.
> Anthropic is not in the programming language market; No, they're intentionally in all the programming language markets.
Just like Google might sell ads on (approximately) all the websites, but they don't particularly care which website you visit.
Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.
Stating you use Codex does not add any meaningful information to the case.
https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/
Yeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself. The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C? C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on. Rust was desi…
> The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. > In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code. Rust doesn't provide either of those guarantees. If I were to rephrase your sentiment for accuracy: Rust disallows certain coding patterns. Certain classes of bugs can only appear in those coding patterns. IOW, Rust disallows $FOO which is a superset of "specific class…
I really don't understand what's the big deal here. Anthropic converted Bun from Zig to Rust using Fable and used that for marketing, but do people blindly trust them? Also isn't Zig still unstable and from that perspective regardless of how they did it, wouldn't it make sense to migrate it to a stable language?
Judging from internet posts and HN comments, many do.
Languages do matter. And I think the only sensible backend languages when starting a new for-profit project is Python, Go, and Rust for 99% use-cases. In other cases, third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry starts to suffer.
Anthropic have lost their minds, and eventually a metric shit ton of money. Meanwhile, nobody uses Bun or Zig either. Rust continues to chug along very very slowly.
Yeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself. The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C? C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on. Rust was desi…
> The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. > In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code. Rust doesn't provide either of those guarantees. If I were to rephrase your sentiment for accuracy: Rust disallows certain coding patterns. Certain classes of bugs can only appear in those coding patterns. IOW, Rust disallows $FOO which is a superset of "specific class…
Also it doesn't guarantee that the code is always 100% correct.
But I think this is the correct direction of programming language evolution.