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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

11–20 of 862 posts

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#11
Yeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself.

The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C?

C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on.

Rust was designed to answer this exact problem (among a few others of course).

So the argument "your code is fscking sheet" is very 1990's. In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#12
I think Anthropic is putting too much time and energy into marketing (and politics) while competitors are catching up on the engineering side.

But what do I know, maybe your CTO bought this and now wants to fire half of the dev team and use Claude to convert your COBOL codebase to Rust...

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#13
Thank you. I was left confused after people praised the Bun to Rust blog post eventhough it contained very actual technical substance. No clear evaluation of options, very biased report on impact, missing figures. It absolutely didn't feel like an engineering blog post.

Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointing from a technical standpoint.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#14
post #8
post #3

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

Stating you use Codex does not add any meaningful information to the case.

I think the point of mentioning Codex was that the author of the post has no relationship with Anthropic, even as a user.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#15
I really don't understand what's the big deal here. Anthropic converted Bun from Zig to Rust using Fable and used that for marketing, but do people blindly trust them? Also isn't Zig still unstable and from that perspective regardless of how they did it, wouldn't it make sense to migrate it to a stable language?

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#16
post #3

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#17
post #8
post #3

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

Stating you use Codex does not add any meaningful information to the case.

It reads as "I don't use Claude Code."

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#18
post #3

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.

[flagged]

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#19
post #3

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

> Anthropic is not in the programming language market;

No, they're intentionally in all the programming language markets.

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