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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

#381

Post by CamouflagedKiwi »

Interesting article, seems more balanced than Andrew Kelley's one that it links to.

The thing I still think is wrong: why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust? Why not rewrite Claude Code itself in Rust (or Go or whatever, lots of options there) and drop Bun completely. That actually seems like an easier solution (rather than having to create a performant, correct Javascript runtime, just rewrite your CLI console app in something else) and the final result is better (smaller and faster) although likely not on the most critical axes for them.

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

#383

Post by cheikhcheikh »

embedding-shape wrote: post #295
cheikhcheikh wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Incredible the different takeaways people get from text content on the internet It is incredible isn't it. "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs" "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 sh…

> There is more but I'll stop quoting to not end up copying the whole thing. Yeah, and perhaps also because your point(s) wouldn't make much sense if people ended up reading the whole article, rather than your cherry picks ;)

nah. I have no horse in this race in fact before this blog I had high regards for andrew and zig, less-so after this blog.

You're accusing me of cherry picking, can you explain how these are cherry picked ? do you even know what cherry picking means ? maybe explain the important context for "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs" that I omitted apparently.

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

#384

Post by inigyou »

Zecc wrote: post #172
whizzter wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen. What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lo…

That was a pretty good car analogy. Thank you. Edit to add: I'm unsure where assembly would sit in this analogy. Skateboard? Monocycle? Perhaps ice skates.

Surely assembly language is like moving with your legs? A Flintstones car, and machine code is walking?

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

#385

Post by empath75 »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #364
pizza234 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

I'm basically of the opinion that if agents can't write your programming language, that's a problem with your programming language.

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

#386

Post by allknowingfrog »

Gigachad wrote: post #334
whizzter wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen. What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lo…

All I’ve seen is there is literally no programmer smart and careful enough to never create a use after free or out of bounds read in a sufficiently complex codebase. The state of computer security has moved on from the old model of just patching bugs when you find them. To now where we need to systematically prevent them from happening to begin with.

Have you heard of TigerBeetle? Being smart enough doesn't seem to be the primary factor. It's about having a strategy and the discipline to follow it. No type system will ever free you from the burden of doing the actual engineering.

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

#387

Post by maleldil »

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…

> I take you haven't read Andrew Kelley's article

Yes, that's the sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.

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

#388

Post by Ampersander »

ashishb wrote: post #23

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.

Why would you need any of those listed capabilities these days? Just generate them with 100x AGI

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

#389

Post by Tade0 »

petcat wrote: post #133
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 becau…

> So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there.

Huge problem with this is that typically safe, idiomatic Rust looks nothing like unsafe Rust.

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

#390

Post by VBprogrammer »

I think the only point that matters is that having Anthropic owning a project which is written in a programming language where the community (or at least the leaders of it) have come out as openly hostile to AI generated code is a clear conflict of interest. I think Andrew Kelley might have been better to say just that and leave it - the comments about Bun's founders energy and motivations don't really add anything worth adding in my opinion.
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