Aside: That font is really hard on my eyes. Anyone else?
We sped up bun by 100x
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: We sped up bun by 100x
#32Re: We sped up bun by 100x
#33With the recent barrage of AI-slop 'speedup' posts, the first thing I always do to see if the post is worth a read is doing a Ctrl+F "benchmark" and seeing if the benchmark makes any fucking sense. 99% of the time (such as in this article), it doesn't. What do you mean 'cloneBare + findCommit + checkout: ~10x win'? Does that mean running those commands back to back result in a 10x win over the original? Does that mea…
Under the hood, bun's calling these operations when doing a `bun install` and these are the places where integrating 100% gives the most boost. When more and more git deps are included in a project, these gains pile up.
However, the results appear more at 1x parity when accounting for network times (ie round trip to GitHub)
Re: We sped up bun by 100x
#34With the recent barrage of AI-slop 'speedup' posts, the first thing I always do to see if the post is worth a read is doing a Ctrl+F "benchmark" and seeing if the benchmark makes any fucking sense. 99% of the time (such as in this article), it doesn't. What do you mean 'cloneBare + findCommit + checkout: ~10x win'? Does that mean running those commands back to back result in a 10x win over the original? Does that mea…
Re: We sped up bun by 100x
#35Sure, if you have a complete test suite for a library or CLI tool, it is possible to prompt Claude Opus 4.6 such that it creates a 100% passing, "more performant", drop-in replacement. However, if the original package is in its training data, it's very likely to plagiarize the original source.
Also, who actually wants to use or maintain a large project that no one understands and that doesn't have a documented history of thoughtful architectural decisions and the context behind them? No matter how tightly you structure AI work, probabilistic LLM logorrhea cannot reliably adopt or make high-level decisions/principles, apply them, or update them as new data arrives. If you think otherwise, you're believing an illusion - truly.
A large software project's source code and documentation are the empirical ground-truth encoding of a ton of decisions made by many individuals and teams -- decisions that need to be remembered, understood, and reconsidered in light of new information. AI has no ability to consider these types of decisions and their accompanying context, whether they are past, present, or future -- and is not really able to coherently communicate them in a way that can be trusted to be accurate.
That's why I can't and won't trust fully AI-written software beyond small one-off-type tools until AI gains two fundamentally new capabilities:
(1) logical reasoning that can weigh tradeoffs and make accountable decisions in terms of ground-truth principles accurately applied to present circumstances, and
(2) ability to update those ground-truth principles coherently and accurately based on new, experiential information -- this is real "learning"
Re: We sped up bun by 100x
#36[flagged]
But then there's this: "When evaluating the complete bun install improvements, it came out speed-wise to about the same as the existing git usage (due to networking being the big bottleneck time-wise despite more cases being slightly faster with ziggit over multiple benchmarks). Except, it's done in 100% zig and those internal improvements pile up as projects consist of more git dependencies. All in all, it seems lik…
When it was clear that there were benefits in filling in more of git's capabilities (ie targeting WASM), I then went and filled in more git features.
It's not by any means a universal win over everything but it does have notable wins like having git operations be between 4-10x faster on arm-based MacBooks than git itself
Re: We sped up bun by 100x
#37So, they implemented a git client in zig, that had some significant speedups for their usecase. However: > The git CLI test suite consists of 21,329 individual assertions for various git subcommands (that way we can be certain ziggit does suffice as a drop-in replacement for git). > While we only got through part of the overall test suite, that's still the equivalent of a month's worth of straight developer work (aga…
> The bun team has already tested using git's C library and found it to be consistently slower hence resorting to literally executing the git CLI when performing bun install. I find that to be a much more remarkable claim. Git doesn't have a C library, and even if it did, In which world is literally shelling out faster than a C library call? I suppose libgit2 could be implemented poorly. If we follow their link[1] we…
Your comment does not seem to be in good faith, implying that they've made up the performance difference. There's a comment with a benchmark here: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/4760d78b325b62ee62d6e47b...
referencing the commit where they removed the ability to link with libgit2 because it was slower.
Having built a service on top of libgit2, I can say that there are plenty of tricky aspects to using the library and I'm not at all surprised that bun found that they had to shell out to the CLI - most people who start building on libgit2 end up doing so.
I don't know what the bun team actually did or have details - but it seems completely plausible to me that they found the CLI faster for creating repositories.
Re: We sped up bun by 100x
#38Seems like they actually sped bun up ~1x: When evaluating the complete bun install improvements, it came out speed-wise to about the same as the existing git usage (due to networking being the big bottleneck time-wise despite more cases being slightly faster with ziggit over multiple benchmarks). Except, it's done in 100% zig and those internal improvements pile up as projects consist of more git dependencies. All in…
You have to maintain a completely separate implementation of AI generated code that's translated from C, so not even idiomatic zig. Edit And then I go their repository and read commits like this https://github.com/hdresearch/ziggit/commit/31adc1da1693e402... which confirms it wasn't even looked over by a human.
That was so the commit authors don't all appear like blank accounts on GitHub
Re: We sped up bun by 100x
#39These "AI rewrite" projects are beginning to grate on me. Sure, if you have a complete test suite for a library or CLI tool, it is possible to prompt Claude Opus 4.6 such that it creates a 100% passing, "more performant", drop-in replacement. However, if the original package is in its training data, it's very likely to plagiarize the original source. Also, who actually wants to use or maintain a large project that no…
This was the "validation" used for determining how much progress was made at a given point in time. Re training data concerns, this was done and shipped to be open source (under GPLv2) so there's no abuse of open source work here imo
Re the tradeoffs you highlight - these are absolutely true and fair. I don't expect or want anyone to just use ziggit because it's new. The places where there performance gains (ie internally with `bun install` or as a better WASM binary alternative) are places that I do have interest or use in myself
_However_, if I could interest you in one thing. ziggit when compiled into a release build on my arm-based Mac, showed 4-10x faster performance than git's CLI for the core workflows I use in my git development
Re: We sped up bun by 100x
#40I think we might be getting to the point where submissions for projects that are primarily written by ai and/or ai agents need to be tagged with [agent] in the title