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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#371

Post by logsr »

krig wrote: post #181
kylecarbs wrote: post #37

Bun has completely changed my outlook on the JS ecosystem. Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance. Now the entire space rallies around it. Congrats to Jarred and the team!

> Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance. This is just completely insane. We went through more than a decade of performance competition in the JS VM space, and the _only_ justification that Google had for creating V8 was performance. > The V8 engine was first introduced by Google in 2008, coinciding with the launch of the Google Chrome web browser. At the time, web applications were becoming increasingly…

> Vibe-coded projects get bought by vibe-coded companies

this is so far from the truth. Bun, Zig, and uWebsockets are passion projects run by individuals with deep systems programming expertise. furthest thing from vibe coding imaginable.

> a decade of performance competition in the JS VM space

this was a rising tide that lifted all boats, including Node, but Node is built with much more of the system implemented in JS, so it is architecturally incapable of the kind of performance Bun/uWebsockets achieves.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#372

Post by matrixhelix »

hinkley wrote: post #350

I 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.

This is why we can't have nice things

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#373

Post by delaminator »

thesdev wrote: post #295
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?

The big picture of “build a runtime” is an easier idea than “what would make this runtime better and how should the parts interact”.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#375

Post by pjmlp »

defen wrote: post #298
pjmlp wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We can think of they making bun an internal tool, push roadmap items that fit their internal products, whatever, which doesn't answer the getting back money of the acquisition.

Profit in those products has to justify having now their own compiler team for a JavaScript runtime.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#376

Post by dunham »

Tiberium wrote: post #35

As 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 JSC less tested? I thought it was used in Safari, which has some market share.

I used bun briefly to run the output of my compiler, because it was the only javascript runtime that did tail calls. But I eventually added a tail call transform to my compiler and switched to node, which runs 40% faster for my test case (the compiler building itself).

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#377

Post by ineedasername »

tyingq wrote: post #287
liuliu wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying that you can raise $7b debt at double-digit interest rate. I am doubtful. While $7b is not a big number, the Madoff scam is only ~$70b in total over many years.

No, I'm scamming myself. Halving my fortune because I believe karma will somehow repay me ten fold some time later.

Somehow? I've been keeping an eye on my inbox, waiting to get a karma vesting plan from HN, for ages. What's this talk of somehow?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#378

Post by junon »

homebrewer wrote: post #129
TheFlyingFish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used Deno, but I do use Bun purely as a replacement for npm. It does the hard-linking thing that seems to be increasingly common for package managers these days (i.e. it populates your local node_modules with a bunch of hard links to its systemwide cache), which makes it vastly quicker and more disk-efficient than npm for most usage. Even with a cold cache, `bun install` with a large-ish dependency graph is…

pnpm does all that on top of node. Also disables postinstall scripts by default, making the recent security incidents we've seen a non-issue.

As the victim of the larger pre-Shai-Hulud attack, unfortunately the install script validation wouldn't have protected you. Also, if you already have an infected package on the whitelist, a new infection in the install script will still affect you.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#379

Post by howdyhowdy123 »

somebodythere wrote: post #328
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 think this wound up being close enough to true, it's just that it actually says less than what people assumed at the time. It's basically the Jevons paradox for code. The price of lines of code (in human engineer-hours) has decreased a lot, so there is a bunch of code that is now economically justifiable which wouldn't have been written before. For example, I can prompt several ad-hoc benchmarking scripts in 1-2 mi…

That's ridiculous. Not it isn't even close.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#380

Post by dlgeek »

KK7NIL wrote: post #148
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was an acquihire, still a lot less slimy than just offering the employees they care about a large compensation package and leaving the company behind as a husk like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have done recently.

Is it? What's wrong with hiring talent for a higher salary? You have no responsibility for an unrelated company's operations; if that was important to them they could have paid their talent more.

You want those people specifically. To get them, you need to hire them for a lot more money than you pay your current folks. That causes a lot of resentment with folks and messes up things like salary bands, etc.

But since they own equity in the current company, you can give them a ton of money by buying out that equity/paying acquisition bonuses that are conditional on staying for specific amounts of time, etc. And your current staff doesn't feel left out because "it's an acquisition" the way they would if you just paid some engineers 10x or 100x what you pay them.

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