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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?

#171

Post by nihsett »

lelanthran wrote: post #158
whstl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Yeah, but the people authoring those learned something. > I used to be part of an OS messaging board in the early 2000s and almost everyone had their own OS. Great example! I, too, once had my own toy OS, and browsed OSDev wiki nonstop. The thing is no o…

Probably not, but sometimes I wonder if the lowered activation bump lets more people try it, even if they just vibecode the whole thing, and maybe learn a thing or two in the process? They wouldn't learn as much as they would if they did it by hand, but they would've never done it by hand in the first place - so this is better maybe? I don't know. The whole field is in a weird place right now, all previous rules of thumb might be wrong.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#172

Post by TheRealPomax »

tomlockwood wrote: post #163
Jarred wrote: post #148

Bun’s Rust rewrite shipped in Claude Code over a month ago and barely anyone noticed. Claude Code is widely used. The Rust rewrite is going well overall. In the Bun v1.4 video, I promised a certain number of newly passing Node.js tests were added to force us to improve compatibility, and that number is not true yet. The release is delayed until it is true. The PRs to make it true are up but not merged yet. Most likel…

[flagged]

Either you mean retrospective, or you're being unnecessarily mean for something that's been getting quite a lot update reports, just on a social medium you probably don't use =P

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#173

Post by tomlockwood »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #172
tomlockwood wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Either you mean retrospective, or you're being unnecessarily mean for something that's been getting quite a lot update reports, just on a social medium you probably don't use =P

I thought it was a fairly common turn of phrase! https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-project-postmortem/

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#174

Post by nicce »

Aurornis wrote: post #128
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 diffe…

> 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

They eventually might regret this, when they are trying to get rid of the last lines of unsafe code. Rust needs to be written differently before you can write safe things to perform fast when compared to other languages or unsafe code. It takes a lot of experience before you can see it.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#175

Post by lantry »

Jarred wrote: post #148

Bun’s Rust rewrite shipped in Claude Code over a month ago and barely anyone noticed. Claude Code is widely used. The Rust rewrite is going well overall. In the Bun v1.4 video, I promised a certain number of newly passing Node.js tests were added to force us to improve compatibility, and that number is not true yet. The release is delayed until it is true. The PRs to make it true are up but not merged yet. Most likel…

Any comment on the costs estimated in the article? especially the buildkite costs?

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#176

Post by dogleash »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #135
Aurornis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's just blind AI hate for no rhyme or reason. I've ported projects from one language to the next using Claude Code long before Bun even did this, it's very trivial for an LLM. In the case of Bun though, they have a test suite to run the entire codebase against, and so long as all of those tests pass, there's and drastically more likely chance that its correct.

The LLM translation of serenity brower's javascript engine to rust and bun's translation to rust actually provide an interesting set of open source projects to compare and contrast. While there will obviously be some blind hate, there is difference in commentary on the two projects. In technical details, Adreas'/Jared's approaches and communication. That all shows me there is substance to the criticism that isn't just AI naysaying.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#177

Post by chmod775 »

skeledrew wrote: post #157
chmod775 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It took TypeScript a year to go from announcing tsgo to releasing TypeScript 7.0. These are not comparable at all. The bun "rewrite" really is more of a translation of a software that is mainly dogfooded, created with an at best loose regard for a wider ecosystem. TypeScript 7.0. by comparison is not just a translation from one language to another. It's a true rewrite that at the same time has to consider a massive…

> The bun "rewrite" really is more of a translation of a software that is mainly dogfooded, created with an at best loose regard for a wider ecosystem. This seems self-contradictory. If it's just a translation, doesn't that mean it remains fully compatible with that wider ecosystem? All the existing APIs retain identical behavior given the preexisting comprehensive test suite that had to go 100% green after all.

> This seems self-contradictory.

It's not.

Passing an existing test suite just moves the optimistic lower bound to incidental compatibility, it doesn't move it to intentional - "regard" implies you gave it thought.

Plus, it's not just about code: it's also about giving the ecosystem a migration path. Dumping 500k LOC on people and discontinuing development of the zig version effective immediately (there hasn't been a release since and the zig tree is only a reference - the build script is removed afaik) is the opposite of what TypeScript did. If you broke someone's N-API module because of a regression not caught by your suite they're now between a rock and a hard place.

The good news is that there's nobody there to notice. The bun userbase is miniscule* compared to TypeScript's.

* negligible? irrelevant? laughably small? I'm struggling to find an adjective that does the difference justice.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#178

Post by TheRealPomax »

tomlockwood wrote: post #173
TheRealPomax wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either you mean retrospective, or you're being unnecessarily mean for something that's been getting quite a lot update reports, just on a social medium you probably don't use =P

I thought it was a fairly common turn of phrase! https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-project-postmortem/

A postmortem is for reflecting on something that went so wrong you had to kill it, and you want to objectively describe what led to that, and what lessons can be learnt from the failure.

A retrospective is just the reflecting part, without implying you believe it is going to fail and you're looking for some schadenfreude ;)

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#179

Post by inglor »

Jarred wrote: post #148

Bun’s Rust rewrite shipped in Claude Code over a month ago and barely anyone noticed. Claude Code is widely used. The Rust rewrite is going well overall. In the Bun v1.4 video, I promised a certain number of newly passing Node.js tests were added to force us to improve compatibility, and that number is not true yet. The release is delayed until it is true. The PRs to make it true are up but not merged yet. Most likel…

Take as long as you need to ensure software quality. A month without a release isn't a big deal and whomever needs a specific feature can offer to contribute or build themselves.

Node has 4-6 weeks without a meaningful release (other than security stuff) pretty much every December. I think the criticism in the article is unfounded and whomever needed/wanted a release should have asked first instead of writing an "angry" blog post.

(I'm a Node.js maintainer)

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#180

Post by pohl »

simonw wrote: post #169

One metric I thought might be interesting with respect to the Rust rewrite is the number of "unsafe" occurrences in the code. I was optimistic those would be going down over time but it looks like they've stayed pretty constant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966569#48967630

Does that data exclude FFI wrappers, which necessarily must be unsafe? If not, don’t put much stock in it.
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