Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged

On one hand I kinda feel validated for having jumped ship on Zig 3+ Years ago[1] and moving everything to Rust[2], with the language simply being too unstable and unsafe in my eyes, despite my love for comptime and people arguing that Bun and Tigerbeetle were proof that it wasn't the languages fault.

But I also feel bad for the Zig project to loose one of their flagship projects, because while I find the project ultimately anachronistic, I know what it's like to pour your sweat, heart and soul into something, and having it replaced within a week is a sobering experience even from afar.

A couple years ago this would have been unthinkable because of how slow legacy codebases and rewrites are.

I wonder if Tigerbeetle will also have problems arguing for their solution now that the other project they can point to for customer assurance is gone. And I wonder if they will follow suit eventually simply due to marketing pressure (after having been bitten by the Zig compiler I was surprised that they were putting their super duper high reliability database on top of it at all, but with another big player using it there was at least some peace of mind for their enterprise customers).

1: https://github.com/triblespace/tribles-zig

2: https://github.com/triblespace/triblespace-rs

I don't really understand the point of this. Is it Anthropic showing off well their LLMs work? Was it too difficult to find Zig devs so Bun swapped to Rust? Did Jarred read one too many memes about "rewriting in rust" and took it at face value??

I would imagine that there will be bugs migrating all at once, performance will probably be close to the same, and the maintainers will need to context shift from Zig to Rust. A very confusing decision for sure.

We have hundreds of projects that run on Bun. (Some are Bun-specific for whatever reason, but most are "runtime-agnostic TypeScript code that runs on Bun, Node 24.2+, and Deno, but that means they run their test suites on Bun, in addition to the other two.)

Out of curiosity, I installed the canary Bun and just ran a bunch of them. It didn't take me long to find one that works on stable Bun and crashes on "canary" Bun.

      schematic git:(main)  bun upgrade --canary
    [1.55s] Upgraded.
    
    Welcome to Bun's latest canary build!
    
    Report any bugs:
    
        https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues
    
    Changelog:
    
        https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/compare/0d9b296af...19d8ade2c
    
      schematic git:(main)  bun run main.ts serve
    Schematic Editor running at http://localhost:4200
    Bundled page in 25ms: src/web/index.html
    frontend TypeError: Cannot destructure property 'isLikelyComponentType' from null or undefined value
        at V0 (http://localhost:4200/_bun/client/index-00000000ac7e3555.js:24:2534)
        at reactRefreshAccept (http://localhost:4200/_bun/client/index-00000000ac7e3555.js:21:6090)
        at http://localhost:4200/_bun/client/index-00000000ac7e3555.js:8766:27
        at CY (http://localhost:4200/_bun/client/index-00000000ac7e3555.js:21:8973)
        at nY (http://localhost:4200/_bun/client/index-00000000ac7e3555.js:21:9285)
        (...more like this...)
        at m (http://localhost:4200/_bun/client/index-00000000ac7e3555.js:21:8773)
        at http://localhost:4200/_bun/client/index-00000000ac7e3555.js:24:6482
        at http://localhost:4200/_bun/client/index-00000000ac7e3555.js:24:6548
        from browser tab http://localhost:4200/
    ^C
      schematic git:(main)  bun upgrade --stable
    Downgrading from Bun 1.3.14-canary to Bun v1.3.14
    [2.02s] Upgraded.
    
    Welcome to Bun v1.3.14!
    
    What's new in Bun v1.3.14:
    
        https://bun.com/blog/release-notes/bun-v1.3.14
    
    Report any bugs:
    
        https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues
    
    Commit log:
    
        https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/compare/bun-v1.3.14...bun-v1.3.14
      schematic git:(main)  bun run main.ts serve
    Schematic Editor running at http://localhost:4200
    [browser] Version mismatch, hard-reloading
    Bundled page in 20ms: src/web/index.html
    
    # working fine as usual... ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯

I mean "passes test suite" is one thing. And a good thing. But... "doesn't break any (or even, say 99.5%) of the apps deployed around the world that are built on bun" is a pretty radically different thing.

It's hard to feel like this is responsible behavior, but I will reserve judgement for now, and see how long they persist this "canary" phase.

If they extend it for a lengthy period, and even like, fix bugs on the Zig version and the Rust "canary" version, then... I would be mollified to a great extent, since it is so easy to switch between the Zig stable version and the Rust canary version.

As a pretty heavy user of Bun, I'm actually pretty psyched for it to switch to Rust... but given the abruptness and speed so far, I can't quite shake the "new AI dealer getting high on his own supply" vibe.

But I hope they enter an intensive phase of prioritizing any and all "canary" bugs, and come out on the other side with a better product, and an even faster rate of improvement (which has honestly been pretty wild already).

(Yes, of course, I will have my clanker file a bug report with repro... but that may take a few days.)

For who? What you say is true for everyone who doesn't know Rust (before Zig), and not true for everyone else, same as it always is been, for every single FOSS project out there.

So it's disrespectful because before you could contribute, but because of the direction of the project, you no longer can?

Does that also means it'd be disrespectful to make projects more complicated and complex, because maybe someone who contributed initially don't know these new concepts, so introducing those would require this individual to learn about those things?

All of this still sounds like entitlement to me. Open source literally isn't about you, let people run their projects as they so wish, them making choices they think are better isn't disrespectful to anyone else, you're not forced to having to contribute to any FOSS projects.

The difference is exactly the speed. Slowly transitioning from one thing to another gives the opportunity to contributors to get involved in the process.