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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

#451

Post by sporkland »

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…

> There's so much good stuff in this post.

The post starts off so cynical. I know a few people at anthropic and oai and the simplest explanation also matches my observations that they actually believe what they say. That agents will be doing the bulk of the programming in the not so distant future. They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point.

They aren't managing some message and trying to teach the anti AI folks a lesson.

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

#452

Post by msdz »

pseudony wrote: post #336
petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I program C for my day-job. I see Rust encroaching in proposed transitions. It may even happen. That said, it is a poor match for it compared to something like Zig (or Odin). It's hard to make the new Rust code use existing allocator abstractions (so now you have two systems doling out memory, how do you reliably free composite objects with memory from both? How do they share?) and you increasingly have to either aba…

If you allow, I’m curious: If you felt familiar with the language just as much as with C/Zig/Odin, would you prefer Rust for a completely greenfield project that requires no C interop (or none more detailed than say providing a general ABI)?

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

#453

Post by pixl97 »

UltraSane wrote: post #432
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.

Reading the output of a LLM prompt someone else wrote isn't useful as I can run the prompt myself. Having the prompt is actually more useful because I can run it in any LLM I want.

Look at Mr infinite tokens over here.

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

#454

Post by skydhash »

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.

They don’t care about the switch and it seems they’re actually happy with it. What they care about is the implied messaging that Zig has issues that the rewrite in Rust solved. Andrew highlighted that they had bad engineering practice, the rewrite did not solve anything, and they invested a lot of engineering with Rust to try getting things to work, engineering effort they have not invested in Zig.

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

#455

Post by selfmodruntime »

lolinder wrote: post #362
deaton wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the wrong abstraction though and I am kind of not surprised the Bun maintainers went way. The correct abstraction would be to translate into Rust while using `clone` and `copy` liberally and then iteratively converting to a borrowing model. Nowhere at all was an introduction of the `unsafe` keyword needed.

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

#456

Post by afavour »

sporkland wrote: post #451
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…

> There's so much good stuff in this post. The post starts off so cynical. I know a few people at anthropic and oai and the simplest explanation also matches my observations that they actually believe what they say. That agents will be doing the bulk of the programming in the not so distant future. They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point. They aren't managing some message and trying to teach th…

> I know a few people at anthropic and oai

> They aren't managing some message and trying to teach the anti AI folks a lesson.

Unless you know the senior execs in charge of marketing at these companies I don't know how you can make that assertion. I believe that a lot of the folks at these companies earnestly believe in the work they are doing. But a belief held by software engineers is not automatically shared by the marketing department, nor by senior execs.

"Anthropic is a giant company with a lot at stake and will seek to capitalize on any marketing opportunity" doesn't strike me as cynical so much as a statement of fact.

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

#457

Post by moomoo11 »

worrycue wrote: post #320
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…

> Rust may have a tremendous success in the future, because it's much easier to write it with AI (ignoring for a moment whether that's really a good thing). It’s interesting that Rust could become the most deployed but the least written (by humans) programming language if the dreams of AI bros come true. If AI gets good enough to competently translate other languages to Rust then there is no point writing in Rust (a…

i’d rather have a run time than this way of working.

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

#458

Post by vlovich123 »

worrycue wrote: post #320
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…

> Rust may have a tremendous success in the future, because it's much easier to write it with AI (ignoring for a moment whether that's really a good thing). It’s interesting that Rust could become the most deployed but the least written (by humans) programming language if the dreams of AI bros come true. If AI gets good enough to competently translate other languages to Rust then there is no point writing in Rust (a…

C/C++ is low friction compared to Rust? Wow. We have very different experiences.

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

#459

Post by therobots927 »

cheikhcheikh wrote: post #93
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…

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…

[flagged]

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

#460

Post by entrope »

jraph wrote: post #215
entrope wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people are entitled to their emotions, but the ways they behave in public and express their emotions reflects on them in a major way. The Bun blog post focused on the technical reasons to change, and was complimentary about Zig. The Zig blog post was heavy on personal attacks, with some technical claims that the Bun blog post had mostly addressed already. Between the two, the Bun post is a lot more compelling fr…

[flagged]

When accusing someone of "good looking lies", it would help to provide an example or two with an explanation of why you think they're lies (rather than mistakes, oversights or differences of opinion). Complaints that the post "subtly and misleadingly throws shade at Zig" are hard to accept without that kind of support.
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