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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

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Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#91

Post by raincole »

embedding-shape wrote: post #18
raincole wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.

[flagged]

> I talked to those who interviewed for a job at Oven. I talked to people who worked there. Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective

Yeah, exact words you would expect from someone who is happy about a win-win situation.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#92

Post by jraph »

raincole wrote: post #16
vlaaad wrote: post #3

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.

Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.

But that hit piece would be an answer to the (multi-billion dollar) studio saying how much better the result is after the rewrite to Unreal, except it's not because Unreal is better (which it could be btw, or not, or more probably it depends on the use case), it's because the studio worked hard to make it look better, which they could have done without the rewrite.

Anthropic does this to sell LLM rewrites and make them look better than they actually are, Zig being the source language, they are a collateral victim of that misleading advertisement. Of course it's unfair to them and of course they should highlight this.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#93

Post by cheikhcheikh »

pizza234 wrote: post #56
vlaaad wrote: post #3

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; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users Anthropic absolutely is in the programming language market. If/since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy, a success story will tie the given language(s) to the given AI company. Rust may have a tremendous success in the futu…

We've read the andrew blog. It is a personal attack a very petty one, you're clearly a biased fan of his and of zig probably if you cannot see the obvious, but we're telling you as outsiders how poorly it reflects on andrew and the future of zig, and this is coming from someone who originally had a very good opinion of zig and andrew, now not so much. You can choose to ignore that and engage in the massive circlejerk zig fans are engaging in during this or maybe take a second and reconsider

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#94

Post by cognitiveinline »

simjnd wrote: post #13

Thank you. I was left confused after people praised the Bun to Rust blog post eventhough it contained very actual technical substance. No clear evaluation of options, very biased report on impact, missing figures. It absolutely didn't feel like an engineering blog post. Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointi…

>very actual technical substance

Did we read the same article? I mean it wasn't talking about a specific line of code, but it had deep architecture details, rational for memory safety and bugs, agentic coding patterns for scale. It was full of substance, multiple times.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#95

Post by user43928 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #59
lemming wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading…

[flagged]

Here are the highlights of the supposed "they work in a way I don't like" disagreement:

> I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy"

> groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset

> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show

> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks

> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs

> While I resent Jarred for making Bun into an embarassment for Zig

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#96

Post by self_awareness »

embedding-shape wrote: post #59
lemming wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading…

[flagged]

And what is even the point of saying that Andrew dislikes how Jarred acts and works?

Let's say the supervisor wants you to write a new microservice. Do you refuse to do it because the supervisor smokes cigarettes and you're an anti-smoker? I think that if you have objections, you should refuse only on technical grounds, not personal.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#97

Post by RetroTechie »

There's so much good stuff in this post.

Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?

Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite.

Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test suites). Also:

"this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk"

How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. As it is, the impressive bit is do such a big rewrite & result seems to work ok. Are Bun users happy with this?

To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok.

Edit: and fwiw, I don't think Zig community should get triggered on any of this. It says nothing about how suitable Zig is or isn't for project xyz, and Zig community is big enough to carry their own project & applications besides Bun.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#98

Post by woodruffw »

embedding-shape wrote: post #84
woodruffw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a huge stretch to call Bun’s post slander. It’s a relatively bland technical post with an extremely contextual negative opinion about Zig. I read both posts, and didn’t leave the Bun one with a negative opinion of Zig. But I did leave the response post with that opinion.

Yet one is technical and the one you actually got a negative opinion about a programming language supposedly isn't? I knew it was gonna happen at one point, guess I didn't believe it'd happen so soon, but I still can't believe that nowadays people make choices about what programming language to used based on what semi-celebrity they like the most, and it's all about emotional arguments. What happened and since when i…

I didn’t say the other wasn’t technical.

(I also don’t have any opinions about micro-celebrities or whatever else. I don’t know Jarred or Andrew, and I have priors about JavaScript that in any other context would naturally bias me against Bun. But the Zig post’s flaws are, in my opinion, not ignorable.)

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#99

Post by rob74 »

raincole wrote: post #16
vlaaad wrote: post #3

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.

Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.

Well, if your game would be one of very few AAA games written in Unity (actually, the only game written in Unity people reasonably familiar with the subject would be able to name off the top of their heads), things might look different...

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#100

Post by khalic »

alloysmila wrote: post #34

I remember the uber db migration post and I can't help but wonder if the tone of these conversations would be different for bun if AI wasn't involved. https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/

The AI panic has infiltrated the space now, and it’s just as bad as the AI hype. Half formed ideas, emotional posts with personal attacks and arrogant language, exaggerated claims, posturing, etc.

In the meantime, most of us are just using whatever tools are at our disposal and minding our own business.

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