Why the hell is a CLI coding agent built in JavaScript?
It’s wild what happens when a generation of programmers doesn’t know anything except webdev. How far from grace we have fallen.
Anthropic acquires Bun
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Anthropic acquires Bun
#342As someone who have been using Deno for the last few years, is there anything that Bun does better? Bun seems to use a different runtime (JSC) which is less tested than V8, which makes me assume it might perform worse in real-world tasks (maybe not anymore?). The last time I checked Bun's source code, it was... quite messy and spaghetti-like, plus Zig doesn't really offer many safety features, so it's not that hard t…
> Bun seems to use a different runtime (JSC) which is less tested than V8, which makes me assume it might perform worse in real-world tasks (maybe not anymore?).
JSC is still the JS engine for WebKit-based browsers, especially Safari, and per Apple App Store regulations the only JS engine supposedly allowable in all of iOS.
It's more "mature" than V8 in terms of predating it. (V8 was not a fork of it and was started from scratch, but V8 was designed to replace it in the Blink fork from WebKit.)
It has different performance goals and performance characteristics, but "less tested" seems uncharitable and it is certainly used in plenty of "real-world tasks" daily in iOS and macOS.
Re: Anthropic acquires Bun
#343Quote 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"
Accurate for me. Accurate for basically every startup from the past 12 months. Prob not for legacy codebases, though.
Re: Anthropic acquires Bun
#344No strategic roadmap is ever going to tell you: "Build a $0-revenue JavaScript runtime and one day an AI company will acquire you"
I had the same thought when openai acquired rockset.
Re: Anthropic acquires Bun
#345> I started porting esbuild's JSX & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig
How was Go involved there before Zig?
Re: Anthropic acquires Bun
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found it to be at least twice as fast with practically no compat issues.
Twice as fast at executing JavaScript? There's absolutely zero chance this is true. A JavaScript engine that's twice as fast as V8 in general doesn't exist. There may be 5 or 10 percent difference, but nothing really meaningful.
You might want to revise what you consider to be "absolutely zero chance". Bun has an insanely fast startup time, so it definitely can be true for small workloads. A classic example of this was on Bun's website for a while[1] - it was "Running 266 React SSR tests faster than Jest can print its version number".
Re: Anthropic acquires Bun
#347I don't really see how Bun fits as an acquisition for an AI company. This seems more like "we have tons of capital and we want to buy something great" than "Bun is essential to our core business model".
Claude Code running on Bun is an obvious justification, but Buns features (high performance runtime, fast starts, native TS) are also important for training and inference. For instance, in inference you develop a logical model in code that maps to a reasoning sequence, and then execute the code to validate and refine the model, then use this to inform further reasoning. Bun, which is highly integrated and highly focused on performance, is an ideal fit for this. Having Bun in house means that you can use the feedback from all of automation driven execution of Bun to drive improvements to its core.
Re: Anthropic acquires Bun
#348> I started porting esbuild's JSX & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig How was Go involved there before Zig?
esbuild is still a Go app today: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild
The first hints of what become Bun were when Jared experimented at porting that to Zig.
Re: Anthropic acquires Bun
#349As someone who have been using Deno for the last few years, is there anything that Bun does better? Bun seems to use a different runtime (JSC) which is less tested than V8, which makes me assume it might perform worse in real-world tasks (maybe not anymore?). The last time I checked Bun's source code, it was... quite messy and spaghetti-like, plus Zig doesn't really offer many safety features, so it's not that hard t…
Is it just me, but I don't find npm that slow? Sure it's not a speed demon, but I rarely need to do npm install anyways so it's not a bottleneck for me.
For deploy, usually running the attached terraform script takes more time.
So while a speed increase is welcome, but I don't feel it gives me such a boost.
Re: Anthropic acquires Bun
#350I wonder if this is a sign of AI companies trying to pivot?
> Bun will ship faster.
That'll last until FY 2027. This is an old lie that acquirers encourage the old owner to say because they have no power to enforce it, and they didn't actually say it so they're not on the hook. It's practically a cheesy pickup line, and given the context, it kinda is.