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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?

#191

Post by chuckadams »

klausa wrote: post #107
flohofwoe wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

If you could successfully write Tetris in Malbolge, I would call that impressive indeed. Just writing Hello World was a major effort IIRC. The nature of the malbolge interpreter makes it more of a cryptography exercise than a coding one.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#192

Post by dogleash »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #178
tomlockwood wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

I've been reading people use "postmortem" to describe software retrospectives for like... 15+ years.

Mostly in the opensource, or marketing-blog spaces. The detailed investigation and fix report was a favorite genre of blogpost. And if someone's bragging about the design of an enhancement, or investigating a bug, then the overall product isn't dead. They're (usually) not talking shit to anyone. It's the bug that's dead. Or security indecent that's over. Or a schedule milestone that's "dead and burred".

It's a 1 chili pepper level of spicy to use a slang term that relates to death. I'd never read it as hoping someone fails. I think people let the corpotalk center of the brain overreact to anything that's not couched in euphemism.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#193

Post by egorfine »

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 chance for 1.3.15 with bugfixes for the rest of us?

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#194

Post by egorfine »

usef- wrote: post #34
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.

I very much doubt they would want to abandon the wider community. They do benefit from others using it. To the contrary, I think any problem with this release would be jumped on harshly so they're being more careful than usual. There's not a rush for the community to move to 1.4 and any issues could poison the community trust.

Like this rewrite did not terminally poison trust?

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#195

Post by simonw »

tomlockwood wrote: post #190
simonw wrote: post #167

This article could increase its credibility by being updated to acknowledge that Bun-on-Rust has been live in Claude Code itself since June 17th, and available as a canary release since it landed on main. Rewrites of this scale certainly justify long canary release periods!

I mention Anthropic dogfooding this in the article.

In this sentence, sure:

> Anthropic is dogfooding this, the machine is still ticking along, and Anthropic employees are directly involved.

The problem is that your article's central claim is that there hasn't been a Bun release since the Rust rewrite - which can be read as implying that the rewrite hasn't been used in production.

But it's been used in production on millions of machines running Claude Code for over a month!

I think failing to acknowledge that hurts the credibility of the article. It's been a heated discussion point in this thread already.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#196

Post by tomlockwood »

inglor wrote: post #179
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 "ang…

Author here: I don't need or want another Bun release or an NPM release or anything like that. Like I very clearly say in the article I just got chatting with a peer about the Bun rewrite and I decided to take a look.

I'm consistently skeptical about new tech whether it is NoSQL or Blockchain or Serverless. Some of the things I'm skeptical about fail and some succeed.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#197

Post by Tehnix »

The bun rewrite inspired me to be much more aggressive on porting code, rewriting code, or vendoring external dependencies to tailor them specifically to our needs in ways that doesn’t make sense to upstream.

I feel like it made me generally more ambitious in what I’d throw at a coding model, but also made me focus a lot more on our testing harness and keeping a lot of it at the boundaries outside the language specific parts.

Having been part of several huge rewrites before, some multi-year long, I definitely would consider bun’s rewrite an enormous success. To keep such a level of test and feature parity, and add improvements on top of it, is a massive engineering feat.

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#199

Post by witx »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #6

Many repeat the point of “$165k is cheaper than team of multiple engineers working on the rewrite for a year”, which I think is flawed — the team of engineers would have produced idiomatic rust, and it would take probably 100k+ of tokens more to make the bun in rust idiomatic rust.

Yes this is a typical case of showing results fast. I wonder what the cost for the remaining 10℅ of debugging and fixing all the bloat will be. Not so cheap I am guessing

Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

#200

Post by tomlockwood »

simonw wrote: post #195
tomlockwood wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mention Anthropic dogfooding this in the article.

In this sentence, sure: > Anthropic is dogfooding this, the machine is still ticking along, and Anthropic employees are directly involved. The problem is that your article's central claim is that there hasn't been a Bun release since the Rust rewrite - which can be read as implying that the rewrite hasn't been used in production. But it's been used in production on millions of machines running Claude Code for over a…

I link to Jarred's writeup on bun.com, where you'll note he mentions that its being used on Prisma and Claude Code.

I don't agree that using something in a very specific environment is the same as a wide release.

I trust readers will either know the backstory or read the articles I link to. Such is life if they don't.

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