Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

Post by JuniperMesos » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

etdznots wrote: post #131

JuniperMesos wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane that you think there's any moral problem with using a LLM to rewrite a FOSS software project in another programming language, regardless of whether or not Anthropic employees are doing it. This is the kind of thing that every free software license worthy of the name allows and encourages anyone to do for any reason.

I didnt say that there was a moral or legal problem with rewriting FOSS in another language, I said that Anthropic doing so in this instance was a direct act of hostility aimed at chilling critical discourse about their products and marketing narrative, and I’m shocked at how many people (maybe) are rushing to their defense. BTW the rhetorical device of misrepresenting what someone else says as something much weaker…

Post by jraph » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #374

jraph wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what we know, probably around $200,000 to run the rewrite and rewiew it, + whatever was involved in writing the blog post and advertise it.

Anthropic produced the tokens. They don’t have pay themselves retail API rates for them. The cost was only provided as an honest estimate of what it would have cost someone else at time of writing, which I thought was fair. The number is peanuts relative to the cost of engineers working on the project. I find it odd that so many people think this cost number is some sort of smoking gun.

Post by selfmodruntime » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #478

selfmodruntime wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is untrue. You can do a file by file translation by using clone and copy liberally. After you're done, you can incrementally introduce borrowing.

You can also do one by using `unsafe` liberally, especially if you're flexible about actually upholding rust's rules (as the bun team just did). But either way, you're still stuck with a code base that's going to need extensive refactoring if you want to actually take advantage of rust.

Post by plandis » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 9:10 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…

Post by FridgeSeal » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

dcre wrote: post #311

embedding-shape wrote: post #4

> Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products. Yeah, don't discount how powerful "marketing" is to management/executives, and also don't discount how absolutely ridiculously petty people can be, especially people who end up like CEOs and similar, req…

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.