Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 862 posts

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

#361

Post by schaefer »

hatefulheart wrote: post #231
p-e-w wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another langu…

Python was invented two years before Java and didn’t move the needle until the mid 2010s. You are the typical mark for hype cycles. Get a clue will you.

> Python ... didn’t move the needle until the mid 2010s.

Nope. I was on a Python project in 2006 and earned a paycheck doing so.

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

#362

Post by lolinder »

deaton wrote: post #355
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…

I've always viewed unsafe Rust as a sort of last resort you use when you just can't do something safely. Porting something to "unsafe Rust" to me feels pointless, and of course this hasty rewrite was probably not the best idea from any perspective.

If the end state were unsafe Rust, you'd be right, but that's explicitly not the intended end state. Unsafe Rust was the reachable first step. Now they have a Rust version and can iteratively remove `unsafe`, which they couldn't do before when it was in Zig.

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

#363

Post by fg137 »

geraneum wrote: post #183
jonkoops wrote: post #142

What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. I don't care that Bun was ported to Rust; I don't care that Andrew wrote a hit piece about it; I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush. What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of ref…

> What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. That’s strange because in this (and Andrew’s in lesser extent) post there’s plenty of substance on both technical, management and corporate influences like the difference of styles guides vs agent instructions, binary size, compile time, Anthropic’s marketing and incentives, etc. It’s hard to miss.

A few of which are on HN front page.

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

#364

Post by budsniffer952 »

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…

>Jarred has written Bun with very bad engineering standards

"You're holding it wrong."

>Jarred has managed public relations very poorly (e.g. ghosting the Zig foundation)

What obligation do you think he has here? Which direction should these good relations flow?

I'm also an outsider here, and reading this post was kind of shocking. Can't believe someone would attack your open source code. It's everything normies hate about ornery IT people.

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

#365

Post by ActionHank »

cropcirclbureau wrote: post #55

I stand with Andrew. As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus. And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a sp…

Wankfluencer has now been added to my lexicon. It's a word that feels like it should always have existed, but didn't. So very aptly describes these personas who would pimp their own mother for a t-shirt with a logo on it.

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

#366

Post by shimman »

r2vcap wrote: post #218
vga1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the same page with you that their AI stance is probably harmful for them -- but I think they wrote those as a reaction to the contributions from Bun and others. So your implied timeline is not entirely correct.

Nobody should feel insulted simply because a project decides to port its codebase to another language. It is a technical decision, not a personal attack. Zig’s response has been a serious mistake. The TypeScript team ported the TypeScript compiler and language service from TypeScript to Go for TypeScript 7.0. Did anyone interpret that as the team insulting TypeScript itself? I certainly did not.

Yes, why would Zig respond seriously to a company that has proven to have utter complete disdain towards humanity? Why would anyone be upset that a company is ruining workers lives, poisoning innocent civilians, and being used to kill school children?

That's just not fair!

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

#367

Post by jraph »

woodruffw wrote: post #299
jraph wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad when you leave and if you avoid ghosting the Zig foundation in scheduled meetings you had with them, I suppose you should be good.

I think we can quibble about the Bun post’s factual claims. But I don’t think the post was deceptive or dishonest in its claims. Like most technical writing, it represents a vantage point. As for ghosting in meetings: sure, that seems bad. I would also be upset if someone did that to me. But you can state that factually without making it into a personal attack. It would even be more convincing.

> But you can state that factually without making it into a personal attack. It would even be more convincing.

I 100% agree with this.

I was just saying that you are probably less at risk of triggering people if you don't politely lie about stuff they make. I don't 100% agree with Andrew's response and I think he should apologize or explain more.

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

#368

Post by hilariously »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #308
manphone wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

[flagged]

Then why don't you just eat soylent and drink tap water while using only your imagination? The medium is also part of the message.

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

#369

Post by dgellow »

r2vcap wrote: post #170

Those problems are partly attributable to Zig itself. If the project accepted AI-assisted contributions, this controversy might never have happened. Completely shutting out one side of the industry and taking a dogmatic position is not helpful, especially for a pre-1.0 language that is still relatively immature. Now the Zig community is attacking one of the largest and best-known codebases ever built with the languag…

> Completely shutting out one side of the industry and taking a dogmatic position is not helpful, especially for a pre-1.0 language that is still relatively immature.

It is useful, you just have different goals in mind than the Zig leadership. Zig shared their detailed reasoning for that decision, which is mostly about the development and protection of the community

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

#370

Post by budsniffer952 »

jraph wrote: post #92
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.

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 th…

>except it's not

Except it is. The people using it told us.

Post reply on HN