To upper-middle class people, their job is a religion. Investing in a programming language is a decision to gamble thousands of hours of your life for a programmer. At some point of projects shifting away from your language, your mortgage and your children's tuition will be affected.
I think it's a miscategorisation that programmers are upper-middle class. Lots would probably reach middle, but upper-middle is more tied to generational wealth and other factors of social prestige that aren't typically attainable for a normal working programmer.
Edit: You mentioned tuition, so you must be American. I am British and our social class "system" is different. I'll leave my comment as some may find it interesting.
I have to say, this whole saga is extremely interesting. Not just from a popcorn-enjoyer's point of view, but as a bit of a bell weather for 2026 software dev.
Exactly, I'm glad bun has done this because it will be fascinating to see how it plays out.
What a weird take. Might as well give up on anything you care about, as its only an "x"
You shouldn’t feel slapped in the face if someone chooses a programming language you don’t like. Full stop.
That's not what he's saying. It's not about the programming language. It's about people contributing, putting effort into the project and being passionate about it and then someone else throwing all off that away.
That's like saying "It took me a month to hand-make this cupboard. If someone made a cupboard in just one day using a machine, do you think I'd trust it?".
Only you can prevent tangential arguments about analogies.
Took me a while to understand what you meant by this, and I hope I got it right: If I use a simile or analogie, people will argue about that instead of my point?
Possibly, but my simile was strong enough to be an example. In fact, it's something that happened (still happens to some extent) in carpentry. Note well the absense of any argument against it, but the downvoting.
It’s really only a matter of time until someone forks the Zig version of Bun. What a slap in the face to all the Zig developers that spent their time, effort and probably even some money contributing to it.
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It's not about which programming language they use.
What is that tool in relation to the rest of your workshop though? If it's a simple hammer that you can swap out for $20 and you only use it once a month, who cares what kind of metal it's made out of, as long as it works. But if the $6,000 4-axis CNC machine that's at the heart of your machine shop and every minute of downtime on it costs you money, if it's starting to rust, no, you don't have better things to do th…
Yeah what if the tool is a JavaScript runner released for free? What is being expressed here about Bun is using the language of due diligence but doesn’t seem to adhere to any of the sensibilities. Should we all be auditing our toolchains to understand internal decisions that each toolmaker undertakes? Maybe! DO WE? Absolutely not. The level of scrutiny bun is getting is *unusual*. They just did an unusual and dramat…
We're all only human, so the deprecation happening is gonna have some biasing going on due to how people feel about AI, yeah. JavaScript runners is a whole ecosystem separate from, say, Python. If Python went and said that the next version of Python, we're using this new AI transpiled runtime that we baked for nine days, people would also freak out "due to normal engineering discipline that we are constantly carrying and applying everywhere." The real question then is just how far off from normal is it? Maybe you don't do audits that you think you should be doing, but eg moving from Python 3.10 to 3.12 can be as rigorous or as yolo as you want. And those versions are old, too. Other ecosystems are going to take their time as well. LLVM isn't going to switch over to something AI banged out in nine days. They're going to have a long dragged out period where they run things in parallel for a while until everyone feels okay about it. If they'd even do something like that.
Personally I am confused by this whole rewrite - the 'crown jewel' of Bun is Webkit, which is written in C++, which is 'unsafe'. This seems like Tauri 2.0 - wrap something in Rust and claim the memory safety issues are gone.
The author was pretty clear about his motivation on the language. It's to make it more sustainable for them to maintain bun (instead of directly making bun safer), but the former can and often will result in the latter.
I’m confused, isn’t this rewrite still unreleased as of today? Surely people understand that a simple, “do an audit for memory safety” will bring it up to par.
I have to say, this whole saga is extremely interesting. Not just from a popcorn-enjoyer's point of view, but as a bit of a bell weather for 2026 software dev.
What's funnier to me is none of them seem to want to abandon npm which keeps getting exploited and hacked. NPM has been the source of just how many industry wide hacks? Three major ones, and a massive supply-chain industry wide campaign against npm. But yeah, bun is the real concern here. I think we need to smell the coffee and review npm and scrutinize it because it is getting dangerously out of hand.
Hi. Electrobun creator here.
I am building a new JS runtime called cottontail.
It’s just a prototype now but the goal is to have a huge standard library powered by native zig such that you don’t need npm.
So you’re right that npm is a disaster and I’m working on solving.