Live data from Hacker News

Zig → Rust porting guide

github.com

11–20 of 592 posts

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#11
post #3

Why? Are there particular reasons that the maintainers of Bun feel the need to attempt to migrate from Zig to Rust?

Possibly related to https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/30/zig-anti-ai/ where the Bun team wanted to upstream work to Zig that was rejected by a blanket anti-LLM contribution policy.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#12
post #3

Why? Are there particular reasons that the maintainers of Bun feel the need to attempt to migrate from Zig to Rust?

Zig is a moving target that has breaking changes in every release (which is fine as they are sub-1.0). But that means that AI tools have been trained on outdated syntax/etc. Zig isn't that common, so there is even less training data to begin with.

Rust on the other hand is pretty established by now and has less breaking changes. It also has more compile-time safety-guarantees that makes vibe-coding a bit more confident.

In top of that, Zig has rejected their upstream contributions. So they'd have to maintain their own compiler in the long run, which is probably just technical debt to maintain.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#13

Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropic does experiments on their own codebase, the Bun team is not gonna do the same vibe coding experiments”. Yet here we are, what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding. Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could…

> what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding

It doesn’t look like that at all. Do you think that all use of AI is vibe coding?

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#15

Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropic does experiments on their own codebase, the Bun team is not gonna do the same vibe coding experiments”. Yet here we are, what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding. Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could…

But why should they? This just seems like the groundwork for an initial refactor and moving from one language to another. They haven't actually committed to switching from Zig to Rust yet. I mean, I get if you are an investor and you want to see if they are using their time effectively, but why would it matter to anyone else?

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#16
I'll be very interested in how this AI port turns out. I am involved in a number of active projects that are being held back by the language / framework is holding back the project, but where a rewrite would be too big of a project to undertake by using only human power.

I've had more success vibe coding Rust than I have in more dynamic languages. I suspect the strictness of the Rust compiler forces the AI agent to produce better code. Not sure. It could be just that I am less familiar with Rust so it feels like it's doing a better job.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#18

Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropic does experiments on their own codebase, the Bun team is not gonna do the same vibe coding experiments”. Yet here we are, what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding. Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could…

I do not know if there's any overlap between these teams, but it seems like Anthropic itself is fairly invested in the Rust ecosystem.

They recently proposed some of their internal tools to be the official Rust implementation[0] of Connect RPC[1]. As a protobuf based library set, this includes a new Rust-based protobuf compiler, Buffa[2].

[0]: https://github.com/orgs/connectrpc/discussions/7#discussionc...

[1]: https://connectrpc.com/

[2]: https://github.com/anthropics/buffa

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#19

Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropic does experiments on their own codebase, the Bun team is not gonna do the same vibe coding experiments”. Yet here we are, what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding. Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could…

I imagine claude is better at Rust than Zig?

Contributors and maintainers will also be easier to find in Rust than Zig.

Zig is a great language and I want to see it succeed, but this is a prudent move for Bun.

Re: Zig → Rust porting guide

#20

Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropic does experiments on their own codebase, the Bun team is not gonna do the same vibe coding experiments”. Yet here we are, what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding. Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could…

But why should they? This just seems like the groundwork for an initial refactor and moving from one language to another. They haven't actually committed to switching from Zig to Rust yet. I mean, I get if you are an investor and you want to see if they are using their time effectively, but why would it matter to anyone else?

Lots of people, me included, heavily invested their time and expertise into Bun, using it as a daily driver, to bundle production code or even using it in production as a JS/TS runtime. Of course, we are interested in Bun to stay a useful tool. The Anthropic acquisition was worrying enough on its own.
Post reply on HN