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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

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

#111

Post by mtlynch »

One of the things I find so disappointing about Kelley's behavior here is that he falsely accused Jarred Sumner of lying about fuzzing Bun, and then when Sumner showed evidence[0] that they've been fuzzing Bun for months, Kelley just silently edited his post[1] to walk back the accusation and never apologized or admitted he was wrong.

I commented on Mastodon[2] to point out to Kelley that it's dishonest to silently remove the accusation, as so many people were already talking about it, and it confuses the conversation if Kelley retroactively edits it, and he replied[3]:

> the false claim is in the bun blog post not mine. I only changed the text because it's easy to lazily argue against it. Please read more carefully. They are the ones being deceitful not me.

Loris Cro, Zig's VP of Community, gave a slightly clearer response[4]:

> Jarred's post has a section about what they "were already doing" to maintain their Zig codebase, which includes "24/7 fuzzing", which will make the average reader assume that the codebase has been fuzzed thoroughly, while in reality it has been for, what, 2 months before the rewrite?

Even then, I find it so bizarre that Loris thinks that if someone says, "We've been fuzzing Bun," and shows evidence of months of fuzzing, then that person is lying because "We've been fuzzing Bun" somehow implies something longer than two months.

The duration is irrelevant. If you say you've been fuzzing it and you've fixed bugs that your fuzzer found, then clearly you're fuzzing. The Zig team doesn't get to arbitrarily move the goalposts of what "fuzzing" means.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845652

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854921

[2] https://m.mtlynch.io/@michael/116896188093796421

[3] https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/116897155344411469

[4] https://hachyderm.io/@kristoff/116898483283387067

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

#112

Post by jraph »

raincole wrote: post #91
embedding-shape wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 emp…

Andrew is bitter (or something related) about this whole situation, that's no question, he writes it in his updated post (he doesn't say "bitter", but he speaks about unprocessed emotions).

People are entitled to their emotions. The question is whether the bitterness is warranted. I think it is.

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by khuey »

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.

If Unity had 2.5 users anyone had heard of before the switch you can see where the motivation might (at least emotionally) come from.

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

#116

Post by kawogi »

Jtarii wrote: post #49
self_awareness wrote: post #11

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…

Most bugs are logic bugs which rust does nothing to help you with.

In my experience, it absolutely does (at least if you use it idiomatically). Using the type system (esp. enums, Result and newtypes) makes a good bunch of invalid states irrepresentable.

This also helps to focus on the remaining things that could go wrong.

The integration of unit tests also lowers the barrier to just sprinkle some tests in, if you're unsure that you got an edge case right. Anf clippy (not stricly the language, but still kind of a core component) greaty helps to stay on the idiomatic track.

No silver bullet of course, but I never had so few runtime issues with any other programming language so far.

What logic bugs did you encounter the most?

edit: mobile typos

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

#117

Post by herrkanin »

RetroTechie wrote: post #97

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 su…

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

In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.

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

#118

Post by scotty79 »

> The Bun code is a mess because of their engineering decisions, including overusing AI agents to write and review everything.

Life would be paradise if people were just good for each other. They are not though. So you need a system for that case. Rust is a system that fits the modern real world software development dynamics than Zig.

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

#119

Post by woodruffw »

embedding-shape wrote: post #104
woodruffw wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> I didn’t say the other wasn’t technical. What was the technical parts of Zig's post that made you leave with a negative opinion of Zig then? Something doesn't add up here.

The technical content of the Andrew’s post didn’t leave me with a negative opinion. To quote my original comment:

> 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, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.

This is the negative opinion in question.

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

#120

Post by themgt »

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…

Yet one is technical and the one you actually got a negative opinion about a programming language supposedly isn't?

Yes, on the one hand here's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" and on the other hand here's my blog "embedding-shape is a stinky slop beginner shit show"

And yet you got a negative opinion of me from the "embedding-shape is a stinky slop hack beginner shit show" post rather than SICP? I feel like I woke up in an alternative universe!

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