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

Bun 1.4

bun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 198 posts

Re: Bun 1.4

#161

Post by theshrike79 »

dolmen wrote: post #156
rwz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rewrite part of get to functionally equivalent to the existing zig version in rust did in fact take 11 days based on the available data. When that was done, they spend some time on a ton of new features and hardening and bugfixing that the Rust rewrite enabled. This took additional time.

At the end of the 11 days, reviews raised much use of unsafe blocks. I guess this is much reduced by now, and the effort required on that front should not be rejected from being part of the migration.

It _worked_ after the 11 day migration. Getting rid of unsafe blocks (Which were AFAIK partly a Zig inflicted thing) was just polish.

Re: Bun 1.4

#162

Post by Timon3 »

chamomeal wrote: post #136
blks wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author didn’t care to himself, just merging enormous PRs with “lol” tweets about how github doesn’t display all the changes because there are too many. This is unmaintable mess, and the author himself is struggling already, given how he pushed the release date ten times.

It’s not maintainable by humans because there’s not a single human person who actually wrote any of it. But I guess it’s maintainable by LLMs. Which is part of the anthropic marketing

Most big projects aren't written by a single human, yet are perfectly maintainable by humans.

Re: Bun 1.4

#163

Post by zapnuk »

iamsaitam wrote: post #154
rwz wrote: post #26

This is a huge win for Bun & Anthropic. I've been keeping an eye on Bun development cycle since they announced the Rust rewrite and the huge drama and backlash it generated. They seem to be proving the skeptics wrong with this release.

What exactly has this update led this to be a "huge win"?

The things stated in the announcement?

Mainly node compatibility though more test coverage and different performance improvements.

Re: Bun 1.4

#166

Post by nathanbijnens »

thebillkidy wrote: post #164

Amazing job to the team! We already tried it out and got -50% CPU and -60% Mem usage! https://scrydon.com/insights/2026/08/21/bun-1-4-at-scrydon/

Same team. Best part was how boring it was! Numbers are staging, equal windows, two RCs rather than one isolated variable - but every Bun service dropped in resource use!

Re: Bun 1.4

#167

Post by moljac024 »

reducesuffering wrote: post #79
hungryhobbit wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's way late and seriously over budget, hard to call that a success.

~3 months start to finish and the price of 1 engineer for a year, to rewrite a critical infra codebase that tens of millions of user software relies on . Truly the goalposts keep moving. This kind of project would've have been 10x the effort and price a few years ago.

It's likely much closer to that price if you don't calculate with subsidized token pricing.

Re: Bun 1.4

#168

Post by tomlockwood »

pas wrote: post #155
tomlockwood wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're never going to know how much it cost and how many hours of engineering time it took behind the scenes.

GitHub commits, PRs and issues are public. even their recent buildkite CI logs are public. apparently there's some kind of automated differential fuzzer to discover Node.js incompatibilities, but probably that's behind the curtain. We might never know the exact dollars and cents amount, but we can make pretty well calibrated guesses.

I'd estimate based on those it cost at least a million bucks.

Re: Bun 1.4

#169

Post by voiper1 »

slowpoke-tail wrote: post #53

For me, notably absent from the release changelog and accompanying YouTube video they were excited to trumpet in the blog back in July, and the claim (still) this took 11 days. It's August 20th.

Weird there's no information about that here.

But if they went down in cpu usage and memory usage, removed a memory leak, and are MORE compliant with nodejs... it sounds like a MASSIVE success?

Re: Bun 1.4

#170

Post by daorhe2272 »

rwz wrote: post #26

This is a huge win for Bun & Anthropic. I've been keeping an eye on Bun development cycle since they announced the Rust rewrite and the huge drama and backlash it generated. They seem to be proving the skeptics wrong with this release.

It is for sure a big accomplishment, but without having paid too much attention to the drama, I understand that the porting was meant to show Anthropic's models amazing capabilities. From what we know, the process took longer than expected and involved dozens of engineers from Anthropic actively working on it, presumably each one with dozens of SOTA agents helping. It definitely was an expensive process when you sum up the engineers hourly rate and the tokens consumed by frontier LLMs. It's not something that a small team engineers can accomplish with a Claude Max subscription (obviously not, but those are the vibes some people were getting with the project).
Post reply on HN