Live data from Hacker News

Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

481–490 of 862 posts

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

#481

The more I interact with the real world and mature as a person the less respect I have for temper tantrums such as these. Even if everything you say is correct, coming across as emotional and petty just does not help your case. This just makes Zig look like a zealot fighting a turf war rather than a serious ecosystem.

Good grief! I can count at least 6 logical fallacies in your 3 sentences.

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

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries This is not done by blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day. You do have to make conscious decisions about code architecture to manage Unsafe code, since you need choose the right invariants for your Safe Rust code to conform inside the module (Note that unsafe pollutes the whole module containing it, not just the code inside the unsafe block!)

There is almost zero reason for a public facing, non-embedded project like Bun to use unsafe anywhere .

You do have to inevitably use unsafe because of FFI (Bun uses existing C++ modules like JavascriptCore for most functionality). Optionally also for performance (at least if you want to win Deno on that front)

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

#483
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading…

[flagged]

>talked about what they didn't like with how Jarred acted and worked

Gossip and hearsay; the "grapevine".

Besides, what does it matter how a language user does business?

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

#484

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 ;)

The article wasn't very long and had little of substance besides these personal attacks. So...no.

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

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok. Maintenance of the zig code was abandoned, while the port continued in the same repo, and it's unlikely any work on the zig branch will keep momentum. So yes it forked, but more in the fork+exec sense (or maybe just exec, the analogy's not that great).

According to Andrew, bun-zig is not something some brave soul would be eager to maintain. > We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt. Just "1MLOC JavaScriptCore wrapper" is enough to…

How many lines of code is Node, which is a wrapper for v8? I'm aware bun is not great quality, I tried and abandoned it myself, but Andrew's consistently bitter and spiteful tone makes him the worst conveyor of his own message.

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

#486
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think there's a good niche for "better C" - and that Zig was the one language angling for that. A language that can be used in the same contexts as C, to do the same things as C code, in very much the same way, but with some modern features, some stronger guarantees and some helpful syntactic sugar? A welcome thing for embedded development. On the other end, Rust to me felt like "better C++" - outside the e…

I wouldn’t write Zig off yet. The faster compilation time is a giant moat. Depending on how LLM usage evolves it could be what ends up mattering.

I write a lot of Rust and work on some large-ish code bases. I’ve also done Zig work and work in other languages with fast compile times.

I don’t think this is a huge moat any more. Structuring Rust codebases in a modular way to keep incremental compile times down is common. The biggest complaint about it is from people who simply don’t like the structure and want to put everything into one big package, but that’s a stylistic choice.

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

#487

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…

> But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.

Early on in my career I wrote a highly critical email - I asked a coworker for his opinion before I sent.

He said “there’s just one thing that would improve this” and hit the delete button.

That intervention saved me, and everyone I was working with, from a lot of unnecessary stress.

Venting is great - get it out of your system. Then take a deep breath, go for a walk, and then decide what to do.

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

#488
post #430

I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. 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…

>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 think it is worse than that, the comments from people in threads about this suggest that this is an attitude that is creeping into the community. They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a mor…

[deleted]

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

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries This is not done by blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day. You do have to make conscious decisions about code architecture to manage Unsafe code, since you need choose the right invariants for your Safe Rust code to conform inside the module (Note that unsafe pollutes the whole module containing it, not just the code inside the unsafe block!)

No one involved in the port proposed "blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day". From the first blog post the creator said: > We can gradually refactor it to reduce unsafe usage and look more like idiomatic Rust after Bun v1.4 ships. What the rewrite does is make the unsafe code greppable, which is a necessary first step to eliminating it and one that's actually achievable rather than going straight to idiom…

> We can gradually refactor it

Is quite a hell of a statement, when memory management issues are highly nonlocal and need some careful design upfront in order for you to nail it.

Unsafe isn't something that you can gradually clean up. Even one single flawed usage of unsafe (an ill-assumed invariant) can poison the whole program in scary ways, and might require a total refactor of your codebase to fix it.

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

#490
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all. It seems much more plausible to me that Jarred just does what he wants. He has said as much.

Why take what he said at face value after "Calm down; this is just an experiment... but actually I'm gonna merge this huge thing in a week"?

Seems like if the experiment didn't work, nothing to lose. But it did and he capitalized it in the most in-your-face possible. it would be interesting to line up the timelines of the Rust experiment vs him joining Anthropic.
Post reply on HN