Anthropic acquires Bun

Finally, an event capable of killing the Python demon!

Incredible news on so, so many levels!

(1) Bun is what technical startups should be. Consistently excellent decisions, hyper focused on user experience, and a truly excellent technical product.

(2) We live in a world where TUIs are causing billion dollar acquisitions. Think about that. Obviously, Bun itself is largely orthogonal to the TUIs. Just another use case. But also obviously, they wouldn't have been acquired like this without this use case.

(3) There's been questions of whether startups like Bun can exist. How will they make money? When will they have to sell out one of the three principles in (1) to do so? The answer seems to be that they don't; at least, not like we expected, and in my opinion not in a sinister way.

A sinister or corrupting sell out would be e.g. like Conan. What started as an excellent tool became a bloated, versioned mess as they were forced to implement features to support the corporate customers that sustained them.

This feels different. Of course, there will be some selling out. But largely the interests of Anthropic seem aligned with "build the best JS runtime", since Anthropic themselves must be laser focused on user experience with Claude Code. And just look at Opencode [^1] if you want to see what leaning all the way into Bun gets you. Single file binary distribution, absurdly fast, gorgeous. Their backend, OpenTUI [^2], is a large part of this, and was built in close correspondence with the Bun folks. It's not something that could exist without Bun, in my opinion.

(4) Anthropic could have certainly let Bun be a third party to which they contributed. They did not have to purchase them. But they did. There is a strange not-quite altruism in this; at worst, a casting off of the exploitation of open source we often see from the biggest companies. Things change; what seems almost altruistic now could be revealed to be sinister, or could morph into such. But for now, at least, it feels good and right.

[^1]: https://github.com/sst/opencode [^2]: https://github.com/sst/opentui

uv is very forkable - dual-licensed under Apache and MIT, high quality codebase, it's Rust rather than Python but the Python community has an increasing amount of Rust experience these days.

That's why I'm not personally too nervous about the strategic risk to the Python community of having such a significant piece of the ecosystem from a relatively young VC-backed company.

Congrats Jarred and team! You have saved humanity many hours already, and I'm sure with Anthropic's backing, you will spare us many more. Farewell would-be headaches from Node & NPM tooling and waiting for builds and tests and package updates. Exciting times ahead!

Using bun on a side project reinvigorated my love of software development during a relatively dark time in my life, and part of me wonders if I would have taken the leap onto my current path if it weren't for the joy and feeling of speed that came from working with bun!

>but they are a company that burns billions every year in losses

No they don't.