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How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

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Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#101

Post by ifwinterco »

mawadev wrote: post #80

I'm gonna say it bluntly: I don't care about bun, never cared about bun and think nodejs is sufficient. The drama surrounding zig and rust still leaves me with a bad taste because I also don't like how nonsensical topics like that influence what we do and what we (have to) care about on a day to day basis. That is just my opinion!

Something about bun always rubbed me up the wrong way (I even hate the name), but I couldn't really explain why.

Thankfully now I have some good material to post-rationalise my intuitive dislike

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#102

Post by pornel »

losvedir wrote: post #32

I'm not sure Anthropic even cares about "releasing" the next version. The rust one has been in use in Claude Code for more than a month now, used by millions of people, and that's as far as they probably really worry about it. They bought Bun for Claude Code and I doubt the open source project matters to them otherwise.

It's just a marketing stunt. They've got the ad for Claude-powered code rewrites, and that worked beautifully. Everyone got the message: spend big bucks with Anthropic to get rid of whatever codebase bugs you - please, think of the IPO!

If it was about Claude Code itself, they could have rewritten it. They keep saying they don't even write code any more, so it shouldn't even matter what language it's in.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#104

Post by Xenoamorphous »

_pdp_ wrote: post #98
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #97

> we’re approaching $800k in money spent on this rewrite. That’s peanuts, if not the shells of the peanuts, for a project and company of this magnitude

How does that help 99.9% of all other companies though?

Some thoughts:

- just because it doesn’t help 99.9% of the companies today it doesn’t mean it won’t help them tomorrow

- 0.01% of the companies employ a much bigger percentage of people

- 99.9% of companies won’t need to do a project of this magnitude

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#105

Post by someguyiguess »

flohofwoe wrote: post #95
klausa wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I understand being skeptical of the whole process; the discourse about this has been extremely tiring. But at some point if “moving one of the biggest actively maintained and used codebases to it without anyone noticing” is dismissed as “it doesn’t mean all that much”, then we’ve lost the plot a little bit somewhere.

It's the equivalent of porting Unreal Engine 5 to another language and then using it exclusively to run a 2D Tetris clone. Let's wait for the next Bun release when more real-world code is hammering it before declaring victory. (also, fwiw, a manual rewrite would be under the same scrunity and suffer from the same skepticism, at least when obviously rushed).

Is it though? What’s your source for that data?

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#106

Post by abalashov »

yuye wrote: post #92
abalashov wrote: post #5

I did suspect that the triumphalist pronouncements, and even the seemingly honest and forthright deep dive, were a little premature. This is a key problem with LLM exuberance: it's very tempting to trade on decades of experience in software using LLMs, because one is tired of typing and manual figuring-out, it seems to work if you're competent, and the payoff is essentially immediate. The real bill comes in the mail…

>because one is tired of typing I consider typing to be secondary to software engineering, but I do concede that for those cases that typing really is the bottleneck, LLMs can certainly be of value. Those cases are rare, though.

Oh, I 100% agree. I'm imagining the case where someone asks an LLM to do trivial things just for the novelty, or because they are fatigued of thinking + typing, but conceptualise the thing they are putting off as primarily a problem of typign and not thinking (I often do that).

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#107

Post by klausa »

flohofwoe wrote: post #95
klausa wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I understand being skeptical of the whole process; the discourse about this has been extremely tiring. But at some point if “moving one of the biggest actively maintained and used codebases to it without anyone noticing” is dismissed as “it doesn’t mean all that much”, then we’ve lost the plot a little bit somewhere.

It's the equivalent of porting Unreal Engine 5 to another language and then using it exclusively to run a 2D Tetris clone. Let's wait for the next Bun release when more real-world code is hammering it before declaring victory. (also, fwiw, a manual rewrite would be under the same scrunity and suffer from the same skepticism, at least when obviously rushed).

If you ported UE5 to, idfk, Malbolge and ran Tetris on it and someone would dismiss it as “not impressive”, I would think they lost the plot too!

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#108

Post by grim_io »

tomlockwood wrote: post #29
SquareWheel wrote: post #20

I'm not sure how much insight we can glean from looking at the number of commits and release cadence here. In the aftermath of such a major refactor/rewrite, I would expect it to take some time to get back up to their usual development speed. Jared and the other developers are new to the Rust codebase, even if the structure is largely familiar. They're also likely focusing on other priorities right now such as tracki…

Author here: I'm also not sure how much we can glean from any of that!!! I look forward to Anthropic or Bun releasing a retrospective after their next release that fully outlines the cost.

There is no incentive for them to be honest about the downsides and problems.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#109

Post by germandiago »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #76

Just a couple more 100hr weeks of debugging, and the last 80% will be done :-)

For me this is how all workflows with AI end up lookingif you really want robust products. Do whatever with AI, go fast (from the point of view of perception, initially) BUT it is not going to work without extra work.

and ho, the bloat, do not forget the bloat, which is technical debt towards the future.

I am not anti-ai per-se, but I consider the software I write as a prouct to add features to and maintain over time. So in this case I think it is not wise to say that bc you got something impressive fast you are done. Now you have bugs, architecture, bloat removal, and others...

Letting an AI manage all the workflow is a recipe for disaster in anything that is not strictly short-term. For this reason, I hardly code one-off scripts myself anymore and I hardly use AI for big things besides discussions with the prompt, reviews and snippets. For adding tests it can also be useful.

For full, long-term products, they try to sell agents, and tokens and the like. I think they do not work well enough what I tried. It always ends up as a bloated unmantainable mess.

Unless something that is totally autonomous (by this I mean 100% autonomous) and automated ever exists, I see writing software that can be maintained by humans still critical. As long as this exists, the productivity upper bound will be that of humans reviewing and driving the workflow, even if with AI support.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#110

Post by mikeocool »

losvedir wrote: post #32

I'm not sure Anthropic even cares about "releasing" the next version. The rust one has been in use in Claude Code for more than a month now, used by millions of people, and that's as far as they probably really worry about it. They bought Bun for Claude Code and I doubt the open source project matters to them otherwise.

If that is really what they are concerned with, they probably could have just had Claude Code rewrite Claude Code in rust? That likely would be far more efficient than changing the language of your typescript runtime that ships to run your react-based CLI app.

I imagine the $800k or whatever this has cost is coming out of Anthropic's marketing budget, so they can make a big splash about it.

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