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

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

#701

Post by veber-alex » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:13 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #665

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…

- When they rewrote the project to Rust, and described Zig as poor choice, there has been a negative fallout for Zig - The ZSF is obviously upset because of the poor publicity No where did they describe zig as poor choice, and there were zero evidence ZSF was getting poor publicity. Had whole of HN, Reddit and Twitter all laughing at Zig this would have make more sense. But that was not the case. As a matter of fact…

I mean, does it even matter?

It's not Bun's or anyone else job to care about Zig's or the ZSF's feelings or publicity.

A project who switches programming languages or frameworks or whatever doesn't need to be afraid of offend anyone.

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

#702

Post by overgard » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:13 PM UTC

edude03 wrote: post #517

mech998877 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this, and I've been spending time thinking about it because some of my friends had a similar conversation. The friction itself does not add value. The time spent thinking on the problem does. Friction should be minimized beyond the absolute bare minimum. Programming is a discipline where your workstation is already streamlined, and it is easy to forget where the friction is. Programming is done in a w…

I liken it to dieting. If your only goal is to be certain weight, then learning how to cook, learning how to portion, learning to make a meal plan, learning about macro nutrients is all "friction" now that we have GLPs. And maybe using a meal prep service reduces some "unnecessary friction" but you still would have to learn a bunch of useful skills along the way. Concretely, If your only goal is to produce "software"…

Nitpick, but this is misunderstanding GLPs (I'm on them). If you don't change your diet and your habits, yeah, you'll temporarily lose weight but it'll come right back when you're off it AND you'll lose a lot of muscle. You kinda still need to do "the right things", it's not a magic cure all. (Of course, same thing can be said of AI).

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

#703

Post by veber-alex » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

maleldil wrote: post #593

worrycue wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> translate it to Rust catching all the memory bugs in the process That's not possible. If it were, you'd just fix the memory bugs directly in the original language. Your best bet is to have a translation littered with unsafe blocks, so you still have to do the work of nailing down the specifics to make them safe. There's no magic "unsafe language" -> "safe Rust" pipeline, even with GenAI.

You really think AI can't convert unsafe blocks to safe code?

The reason AI can't fix memory unsafety in the original language is the same reason humans can't do it. There isn't enogh feedback from the compiler.

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

#704

Post by ljm » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #128

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…

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…

It's very strange to vibe code a project and feel both a lack of emotional investment but also the cognitive overhead of steering an AI.

The process of iteration, or the feedback loop, typically allows space to try things out and experiment and then either drop an idea or refine it more purposefully. And those breaks in between the pure delivery to focus on that gives you room to breathe and also see the progress of your work.

Blatting it out in 6 hours with Fable 5 skips all of that and you have something like an MVP, but you haven't really put anything of yourself into it. So why bother committing unless you can take that further or apply something novel or reflect your own personality in it? Or you genuinely believe you're on to something and the AI approach actually gave you a path to building it?

I've been 'vibe coding' something, I've spent about a month on it on and off along with a fair bit of debugging on some sticky issues. I still think I'd suffer going into that codebase and doing stuff in it by hand, no matter how well I thought I organised it all.

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

#705

Post by woodruffw » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

overgard wrote: post #700

woodruffw wrote: post #28

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…

To me it's just highlighting the reality -- Anthropic fired the first shots. I think it's reasonable for people to say, hey, if you're going to trash the reputation of Zig (in a pretend-objective way) then it's entirely fair for people to put in important context that Bun was not written well.

I really struggle to find a plain, non-motivated reading of the Bun's post that could be fairly described as a "trashing." It's a very bland post.

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

#706

Post by overgard » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

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…

C++ programmer here. I've looked at transitioning some of my code to Rust; not particularly out of a dissatisfaction with C++ but more just out of curiosity. I've always ended up deciding against it though, I feel like its safety features just come at too high of a price for the kind of work I do. If I was writing something that needs to be super secure like a web server or something I think it would make a lot of sense, but for most of the things I do memory corruption is relatively easy to avoid with good patterns and a crash just kills a local application. YMMV but I think the "safety" of Rust gets a little overhyped.. most the bugs I run into are not memory safety bugs.

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

#707

Post by woodruffw » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:25 PM UTC

ibejoeb wrote: post #697

anthonypasq wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

none of this justifies a nasty mean spirited blog post.

I didn't say or imply that it did. I just don't believe that the decision to port bun was based on innate technical merits of zig vs rust. I also don't think that it is entirely meritless, as I mentioned, because now that there's a par rewrite, there is clear delineation of the areas that need to be ported to safe rust. Still, does anyone really think that this would have happened without Anthropic's provocation? I s…

I don't understand how a port is a "provocation." That's a very cynical and transactional way of thinking about open source.

(As for Anthropic's motivation: only they know. But I suspect that they saw Zig's AI policy as a potentially existential risk, and moved to de-risk their position. That is a technical decision, just not one rooted in the merits of any particular language.)

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

#708

Post by TeriyakiBomb » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

mech998877 wrote: post #480

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and…

I disagree with this, and I've been spending time thinking about it because some of my friends had a similar conversation. The friction itself does not add value. The time spent thinking on the problem does. Friction should be minimized beyond the absolute bare minimum. Programming is a discipline where your workstation is already streamlined, and it is easy to forget where the friction is. Programming is done in a w…

I think this is just my choice of wording, friction as a means of slowing down and thinking something through is useful. Friction isn't just a roadblock. For all the times you want to do something exotic, throw an hour or two at it and in the process realise it was a bad idea and a more elegant idea emerges. That, that's the kind of useful friction I mean.

But overall yes, time spent thinking is the thing that matters.

It's less "there should be more friction" and more "LLMs remove too much". Instant gratification is great if you're a consumer, awful if you're a creator.

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

#709

Post by TeriyakiBomb » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:30 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #620

mech998877 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your concluding example doesn't make sense to me but I think that it's because we have different definitions for what friction means here. It's also kind of hard to define in context. I would say that, within the Wright Brothers example, working with a battered, worn-out screwdriver is an example of friction (or, perhaps having to use a bit and brace instead of a power drill), but the act of building a new unsuccessf…

It sounds like you're not disagreeing with what the other person was saying then, you're just disagreeing with their application of the word "friction". I don't think it makes much sense to argue about the precise definition of a metaphor.

Didn't see this reply before adding my own. Yes, I think we're in agreement.

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

#710

Post by overgard » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

postalrat wrote: post #341

dcre wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy This premise makes no sense. AI makes rewrites to any language easy.

IMO there is no reason to believe llms create equal quality code in all languages.

They really don't. Even per-project it can be a shitshow. For instance, while I use LLMs to write some typescript, when I'm writing code for Unreal Engine in C++ & Blueprint I pretty much do it by hand because it absolutely can't do blueprint in any meaningful sense. Even the most basic requests result in an absolute mess. (I imagine it's also very hard to train on since its stored as binary data). Even the C++ code it generates is pretty rough -- regular linker errors etc.