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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

#131

Post by etdznots »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #108
etdznots wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's insane that you think there's any moral problem with using a LLM to rewrite a FOSS software project in another programming language, regardless of whether or not Anthropic employees are doing it. This is the kind of thing that every free software license worthy of the name allows and encourages anyone to do for any reason.

I didnt say that there was a moral or legal problem with rewriting FOSS in another language, I said that Anthropic doing so in this instance was a direct act of hostility aimed at chilling critical discourse about their products and marketing narrative, and I’m shocked at how many people (maybe) are rushing to their defense.

BTW the rhetorical device of misrepresenting what someone else says as something much weaker or incorrect and then arguing with that is usually called “strawmanning”. Just thought I’d point that out to you in case you weren’t conscious that this is what you’re doing.

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

#132

Post by witx »

brainless wrote: post #25

"Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering" - good but are they the only ones? I do not like Anthropic after their recent locking mechanisms. I use opencode with GLM, Mimo, Qwen, and what not. I use Codex as well. Anthropic does not need to tell me that much of software engineering is being re-written. In my opinion, the costs have crashed. I build commercial projects at 1/3rd my earlier costs. I…

You have a very fitting username

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

#133

Post by petcat »

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…

> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something.

Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there.

I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

Just search "segfault" on the Zig issue tracker and you'll see why people are starting to be skeptical of the future utility of such a language in the face of something like Rust.

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

#134

Post by stingraycharles »

yulaow wrote: post #102
ModernMech wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not weird considering what we’ve learned through this: the Zig project is driven by people with fragile emotions and egos who lash out at people personally when they feel threatened. We’d like Zig to be a project with steady and technically driven leadership like Rust, but Kelley has made clear (many times) it’s more of an egoistic vanity project like Elm, designed to cater to the emotional needs of the BDFL.

[flagged]

Ehr, they weren’t the ones personally attacking others in a public blog post, were they?

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

#136

Post by f-serif »

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.

It is in there nature. They (specially zig creator) were so jealous about about vlang getting traction and getting $800/month donations, they made it their core mission to attack vlang and spread hate.

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

#137

Post by mi_lk »

mtlynch wrote: post #111

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 r…

> 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

If you read the post again this sentence is not removed and Sumner did not refute that

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

#139

Post by kawogi »

piker wrote: post #114

Wow, it's unsafe Rust? That seems... like the worst of all worlds. If nobody knows why the unsafe is required there's no way they'll be able to unwind it. If they can't unwind it then they're in a worse version of C (+ cargo).

IIUC that was meant as an intermediate step (which isn't uncommon), which IMO makes the translation way less exciting.

The interesting part will be whether they can transform that "mechanical Rust" into something idiomatic. I'm waiting ...

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

#140

Post by bigcityslider »

piker wrote: post #114

Wow, it's unsafe Rust? That seems... like the worst of all worlds. If nobody knows why the unsafe is required there's no way they'll be able to unwind it. If they can't unwind it then they're in a worse version of C (+ cargo).

Unsafe Rust makes me think they did this entirely because LLMs are better at Rust than at Zig, but let's see what happens next.
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