Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

lockwood.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 412 posts

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#121

Post by NiloCK »

flohofwoe wrote: post #63
usef- wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have made a release, in a sense, since they moved all Claude code users to it a month ago. (And apparently no one noticed). I think they're taking things "gradually" as they are under a lot of scrutiny and no rush for full release.

Claude Code most likely only uses a tiny fraction of Bun/Node features, so Claude Code switching to the Rust rewrite doesn't mean all that much.

I'll bite.

Claude code interacts with many system processes, files, etc, as well as external APIs. Processes audio via built in dictation. Manages a bunch of nasty auth. Etc etc.

What are the categories of features that wouldn't be exercised by this class of software?

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#122

Post by Aurornis »

usef- wrote: post #26
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…

They also have made a release, in a sense, since they moved all Claude code users to it a month ago. (And apparently no one noticed). I think they're taking things "gradually" as they are under a lot of scrutiny and no rush for full release.

Claude Code has a huge userbase. This is an impressive result so soon after the rewrite.

This is an impressive milestone for their rewrite. There are a lot of comments trying to downplay this as being unimpressive for some reason, but I can’t see them as anything other than sour grapes because the rewrite hasn’t crashed and burned like they were hoping.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#123

Post by galangalalgol »

reddalo wrote: post #79
oblio wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you comparing 2 relatively simple games with... Word? Word is basically an operating system. Unix people like to make fun of Emacs for being one, but Word is basically one, too. And all the features in there are used, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't keep them around.

>Word is basically an operating system. And .doc files are basically a memory dump.

That was certainly true once, but now all that state is serialized to xml amd zipped up. You can unzip it and look at it if you don't value your sanity.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#124

Post by piker »

whstl wrote: post #90
benjiro29 wrote: post #41

I really do not understand how software developer think anymore. Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Just like one-shot whatever office clone. But what makes software is not the fast creation of a "product" but that actual development of its features. Figuring out how everything needs to work together, fixing the bugs, and the o so boring UI work. I have used LLMs to create st…

I think this is perfectly fine. If you explore Github, you're gonna see thousands of abandoned game engines, compilers for made-up languages. And that has been happening since before the LLM era. I used to be part of an OS messaging board in the early 2000s and almost everyone had their own OS. A dozen people or so could even run Firefox! I remember (now legend) Terry bothering us to check out LoseThos or GodOS or wh…

> Not all software needs to be commercial to be useful, even if it's just for a learning experience. I have learned a lot from those experiments, even if they're not polished.

This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#125

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

benjiro29 wrote: post #41

I really do not understand how software developer think anymore. Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Just like one-shot whatever office clone. But what makes software is not the fast creation of a "product" but that actual development of its features. Figuring out how everything needs to work together, fixing the bugs, and the o so boring UI work. I have used LLMs to create st…

> Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible.

Not really. Transpilers have existed since forever.

The hard part is all the edge cases. (And LLMs don't solve this problem; they probably akshually exacerbate it.)

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#126

Post by Atotalnoob »

rienbdj wrote: post #44
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.

Anyone know why? Can’t CC run on any JS runtime?

Yes, but it’s slower on non-bun runtimes. Nowadays, I believe they bundle bun with CC

They chose to use a react rendering to native TUI renderer, which was a source of a lot of performance issues.

AFAIK, they have written a new renderer.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#127

Post by jdiff »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #67
rienbdj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone know why? Can’t CC run on any JS runtime?

because their js code is so bad and slow that they need the bun performance hacks and optimisations.

Do these hacks make bun less secure than other runtimes? I find it a little hard to believe you can get much more robust and performant than V8 or SpiderMonkey without cutting some corners that notably went uncut by either for all these years.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#128

Post by Aurornis »

benjiro29 wrote: post #41

I really do not understand how software developer think anymore. Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Just like one-shot whatever office clone. But what makes software is not the fast creation of a "product" but that actual development of its features. Figuring out how everything needs to work together, fixing the bugs, and the o so boring UI work. I have used LLMs to create st…

> Its one thing to get a head start using this trick, its another to actually learn the code of your rewrite.

I worked for a startup that stopped feature development and did a complete rewrite of a huge codebase. I was assigned to a side project during this time and missed the entire rewrite process. I came back to a completely rewritten codebase.

There was almost no learning curve, despite being in an entirely different language. The core architecture, data structures, and concepts were the same.

If you read the Bun blog post on how they did it, their rewrite was similar: The first step was getting it into a new language, not rearchitecting it from scratch.

I think they did it the right way based on my pre-LLM. Rewriting into a different language as fast and basically as possible is important for getting the team switched over quickly. Rewriting into a different language in X days is actually a good goal to minimize.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#129

Post by BearOso »

NiloCK wrote: post #121
flohofwoe wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude Code most likely only uses a tiny fraction of Bun/Node features, so Claude Code switching to the Rust rewrite doesn't mean all that much.

I'll bite. Claude code interacts with many system processes, files, etc, as well as external APIs. Processes audio via built in dictation. Manages a bunch of nasty auth. Etc etc. What are the categories of features that wouldn't be exercised by this class of software?

Yeah, but a lot of hard work is done by those libraries. Interaction with external interfaces would go through the tools API, which I imagine would all use the same type of code that they could focus on fixing quickly.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#130

Post by jgalt212 »

jeltz wrote: post #42
tomlockwood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given their history with previous other marketing stunts I do not expect any retrospective. The technology is real but I have little faith in open and honest communication from Anthropic.

truth. We'll just have to wait and see what the frequency and severity of bug reports is going forward. I have my biases, but I'm not going to make any forecasts here. I'm content to let the evidence dribble in. However, I don't rely on Bun for any critical systems. i.e. I realize it's easy for me to have a wait and see attitude with this one.
Post reply on HN