Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 1001 posts

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#291

Post by jjcm »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #45

I’ll be honest, while I have my doubts about the match of interests and cohesion between an AI company and a JS runtime company I have to say this is the single best acquisition announcement blog post I’ve seen in 20 years or so. Very direct, very plain and detailed. They cover all the bases about the why, the how, and what to expect. I really appreciate it. Best of luck to the team and hopefully the new home will su…

One thing I like about this, despite it meaning Bun will be funded, is Anthropic is a registered public benefit corporation. While this doesn't mean Anthropic cant fuck over the users of Bun, it at least puts in some roadblocks. The path of least-resistance here should be to improve Bun for users, not to monetize it to the point where it's no longer valuable.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#292

Post by diarrhea »

reactordev wrote: post #226
satvikpendem wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search for pointer exceptions or core dumps on Bun's GitHub issues and you'll see why people (should) use Deno over Bun, if only because Rust is a way more safe language than Zig.

This is a non sequitur. Both Rust and Zig and any other language has the ability to end in an exception state. Whether it be kernel exception, pointer exception, or Rust's panic! - these things exist. The reason why you see so many GitHub issues about it is because that's where the development is. Deno is great. Bun is great. These two things can both be great and we don't have to choose sides. Deno has it's use case…

> This is a non sequitur. Both Rust and Zig and any other language has the ability to end in an exception state.

There are degrees to this though. A panic + unwind in Rust is clean and _safe_, thus preferable to segfaults.

Java and Go are another similar example. Only in the latter can races on multi-word data structures lead to "arbitrary memory corruption" [1]. Even in those GC languages there's degrees to memory safety.

1: https://go.dev/ref/mem

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#293

Post by reddalo »

wmf wrote: post #223
hedayet wrote: post #127

No strategic roadmap is ever going to tell you: "Build a $0-revenue JavaScript runtime and one day an AI company will acquire you"

Honestly that's probably the best play. Monetizing dev tools directly is a nightmare.

And you risk ending up like Postman or Insomnia, once beautiful software which is now widely hated by developers.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#294

Post by morkalork »

wmf wrote: post #223
hedayet wrote: post #127

No strategic roadmap is ever going to tell you: "Build a $0-revenue JavaScript runtime and one day an AI company will acquire you"

Honestly that's probably the best play. Monetizing dev tools directly is a nightmare.

Countdown till Astral is acquired?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#295

Post by thesdev »

mokarma wrote: post #122

Quote from the CEO of Anthropic in March 2025: "I think we'll be there in three to six months where AI is writing 90% of the code and then in 12 months we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code"

Why didn't they have the AI write a JS runtime instead of this acquisition?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#296

Post by kelvinjps10 »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #94
andrewl-hn wrote: post #45

I’ll be honest, while I have my doubts about the match of interests and cohesion between an AI company and a JS runtime company I have to say this is the single best acquisition announcement blog post I’ve seen in 20 years or so. Very direct, very plain and detailed. They cover all the bases about the why, the how, and what to expect. I really appreciate it. Best of luck to the team and hopefully the new home will su…

But how is another company that is also VC backed and losing money providing stability for Bun? How long before we hear about “Our Amazing Journey”? On the other hand, I would rather see someone like Bun have a successful exit where the founders seem to have started out with a passion project, got funding, built something out they were excited about and then exit than yet another AI company by non technical founders…

I misread Amazon, implying that Amazon might buy Anthropic, and I think that's what will end up happening.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#297

Post by reddalo »

dawnerd wrote: post #267
reactordev wrote: post #213

Bun is such a great runtime. If you haven't tried it, try it. It's got bells and whistles. This will make sure Bun is around for many, many , years to come. Thanks Anthropic. Why Bun? Easy to setup and go. bun run Bells and whistles. (SQL, Router, SPA, JSX, Bundling, Binaries, Streams, Sockets, S3) Typescript Supported. (No need to tsc, bun can transpile for you) Binary builds. (single executables for easy deployment…

> This will make sure Bun is around for many, many, years to come. Well, until the bubble bursts and Anthropic fizzles out or gets acquired themselves.

...and then it's going to be time for an "incredible journey" post.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#298

Post by defen »

pjmlp wrote: post #285
defen wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find comments like this fascinating, because you're implicitly evaluating a counterfactual where Bun was built with Rust (or some other "interesting" language). Maybe Bun would be better if it were built in Rust. But maybe it would have been slower (either at runtime or development speed) and not gotten far enough along to be acquired by one of the hottest companies in the world. There's no way to know. Why did Ant…

Because maybe they reached out to them, and they didn't took the money, while Bun folks business model wasn't working out? Who knows? Besides, how are they going to get back the money spent on the acquisition? Many times the answer to acquisitions has nothing to do with technology.

> Claude Code, FactoryAI, OpenCode, and others are all built with Bun.

Anthropic chose to use Bun to build their tooling.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#299

Post by fredoliveira »

mjr00 wrote: post #245
mokarma wrote: post #122

Quote from the CEO of Anthropic in March 2025: "I think we'll be there in three to six months where AI is writing 90% of the code and then in 12 months we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code"

Why didn't they just use AI to write their own Bun instead of wasting 8-9 figures on this company? Makes no sense.

"Wasting" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

They're effectively bringing on a team that's been focused on building a runtime for years. The models they could throw at the problem can't be tapped on the shoulder, and there's no guarantee they'd do a better job at building something like Bun.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#300

Post by OkayPhysicist »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #266
mokarma wrote: post #122

Quote from the CEO of Anthropic in March 2025: "I think we'll be there in three to six months where AI is writing 90% of the code and then in 12 months we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code"

I'm curious what people think of quotes like these. Obviously it makes an explicit, falsifiable prediction. That prediction is false. There are so many reasons why someone could predict that it would be false. Is it just optimistic marketing speech, or do they really believe it themselves?

Everybody knows that marketing speech is optimistic. Which means if you give realistic estimates, then people are going to assume those are also optimistic.
Post reply on HN