Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by Orygin » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

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.

> Did anyone interpret that as the team insulting TypeScript itself?

No because Go and Typescript have wildly different use cases, and they explained in details the rationale for migrating the compiler, and why Go versus Rust. Their rationale makes sense, and did not throw Typescript under the bus (obviously).

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

#562

Post by mawadev » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

bergheim wrote: post #529

what I don't understand is, given the anthropic narrative, why on earth rewrite bun to rust, and not claude code to rust? why use typescript at all when the whole point is that languages don't matter anymore? I suppose it is solely because it would be a bad look on them to rewrite claude itself - it means they failed - but rewriting bun is a much better narrative - claude is fine! it's just his runtime we need fixing…

I think this post completely destroyed anthropics narrative

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

#563

Post by doug_durham » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

I don't agree that Anthropic's position is AI is all you need. My interpretation is that it's about developer acceleration. I've been following their messaging closely and it's not that you can fire all of your developers. It's mostly their developers saying they are somewhat more productive. They have published papers showing that productivity gains are uneven.

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

#564

Post by neutronicus » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

araoz wrote: post #477

neutronicus wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I mean … as a C++ dev I have those same existential “what’s the point” questions about Zig.

AFAIK zig is not trying to be "better C++" (that is Rust), zig is more like "better C". a ergonomic low level lang with very little abstractions. zig explicitly doesn't want to be better C++ or rust

Oh, I get that.

That’s what I’m saying. I hear “Better C” and my initial reaction is “what’s the point”. Like, why would you aim for “Worse C++”?

I mean, compile times. That’s fair.

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

#565

Post by Xirdus » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

wavemode wrote: post #508

Aurornis wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TigerBeetle has a unique static memory allocation strategy at launch time. It’s a strategy that sidesteps a lot of memory management issues but only works for very specific use cases. Their success with this strategy isn’t portable to most other projects. I think they really need more traditional flagship projects that generalize to typical memory management use cases. The way the conversation keeps coming back to Ti…

I would say the exact opposite, actually - Zig is a language specifically suited for TigerBeetle's all-at-once approach to memory management, and the approach more commonly used in Rust (allocate wherever and whenever) is non-idiomatic in Zig. > only works for very specific use cases. It's not clear to me what you mean by this.

The funny thing is that Rust works perfectly fine with statically preallocated memory. It's not even against its idioms - most code will work with zero changes. In a way, the borrow checker is the perfect tool for this situation, since nothing owns any memory and everything is borrowed from the static allocation.

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

#566

Post by poncho_romero » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #141

This paragraph is written by AI. I did not notice it earlier in the piece: > The piece about the migration process is very cool, with details that are reusable. No complaints, I think that’s the real contribution here. I particularly like the honesty in explaining that this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk, paving the way for redesign in future steps. That’s a sens…

Why would the author write this paragraph alone using AI?

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

#567

Post by pizlonator » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

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 read a decent chunk of the rewrite.

It’s inaccurate to call it a rewrite. It’s more a transliteration - it matches the original Zig almost exactly but the syntax is different.

And yeah, unsafe blocks anywhere that rust would have complained

So it’s highly likely that the “rewrite” is exactly as reliable as the original.

(It sure feels like this was done for Anthropic marketing reasons, the more I think about it.)

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

#568

Post by joshgachnang » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:39 PM UTC

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 run into a bunch of segfaults in Bun whenever I went slightly off the beaten path, probably from the "horrifying" Zig code. A huge test suite + a clean rewrite with a path towards more safety is how I would go about it too, personally. Now whether I would do that rewrite in Zig or Rust, I'm not sure. But I have high hopes it's going to work a lot better, especially since Anthropic uses Bun heavily.

Are LLMs better at writing Rust than Zig? I'd assume so, there's way more Rust open source code than Zig. And if so, that's a very solid reason to switch IMO.

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

#569

Post by locknitpicker » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:40 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #531

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…

> the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C I don't think anyone who actually uses zig thinks "it doesn't offer enough over C". Removing #define alone would have been worth it.

> Removing #define alone would have been worth it.

If you reach out to any project manager and pitch the idea to rewrite a whole app from scratch because you want to get rid of #define, first you will be laught out of the room and second they will reach out to HR to get a PIP going because whatever the hiring bar they used to hire a developer you clearly are not meeting it.

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

#570

Post by mannanj » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

It's hardly really about Anthropic. It's about all the people who funded them, and other AI companies, who are on the campaign by funding Anthropic seeking to end a majority of life for most humans.

Because that's what it really appears to be about, preserving a rich man family's legacy so his children can live for another few generations before they over populate and humanity repeats the cycle of indefinite war, hoarding of resources, and killing to have more for yourself. I guess every rich, powerful generation though doesn't think that future will come now, so they keep manipulating their way to extracting more and more from people and stealing their way to the top.

When a majority of the population is sick, naive, and overstimulated its not hard to convince them with your propaganda that that you are on their side and that the sacrifices they make for your power are worth it. of course they don't see how their life spans, their deaths, etc were for you cause and not theirs.