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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#381

Post by logsr »

munificent wrote: post #108
polskibus wrote: post #89

Wouldn’t it make more sense to write the same functionality using a more performant, no-gc language? Aren’t competitors praised for their CLIs being faster for that reason?

With AI tooling, we are in the era where rapid iteration on product matters more than optimal runtime performance. Given that, implementing your AI tooling in a language that maximizes engineer productivity makes sense, and I believe GC does that.

JS/TS has a fundamental advantage, because there is more open source JS/TS than any other language, so LLMs training on JS/TS have more to work with. Combine that with having the largest developer community, which means you have more people using LLMs to write JS/TS than any other language, and people use it more because it works better, then the advantage compounds as you retrain on usage data.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#382

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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.

I left out the part that the motivations for the acquirers were not to save money or to be slimy. It was the only way to get around overzealous government regulators making it harder to acquirer companies.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#383

Post by bblaylock »

This reads more like Anthropic wanted to hire Jarred and Jarred wants to work with AI rather than build a Saas product around bun. I doubt it has anything to do with what is best for bun the project. Considering bun always seemed to value performance more than all else, the only real way for them to continue pursuing that value would be to move into the actual js engine design. This seems like a good pivot for Jarred personally and likely a loss for bun.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#384

Post by EMM_386 »

dboon wrote: post #141
ctoth wrote: post #50

This decision is honestly very confusing to me as a constant user of Claude Code (I have 3 of them open at the moment.) So many of the issues with it seem to be because ... they wrote the damn thing in JavaScript? Claude is pretty good at a constrained task with tests -- couldn't you just port it to a different language? With Claude? And then just ... the huge claude.json which gets written on every message, like ...…

Ink (and modern alternatives) probably are the best TUI toolkit. If you want to write a UI that's genuinely good, you need e.g. HTML, or some way to express divs and flex box. There isn't really another way to build professional grade UIs; I love immediate mode UI for games, but the breadth of features handled by the browser UI ecosystem is astonishing. It is a genuinely hard problem. And if you're expressing hierarc…

Ink seems to be the root cause of a major issue with the Claude Code CLI where it flickers horribly when it needs to repeatedly clear the screen and redraw.

I don't know why it's even necessary for this.

https://github.com/atxtechbro/test-ink-flickering

Issue on Claude Code GitHub:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#385

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

epiccoleman wrote: post #136
CSSer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know for sure, but it's definitely the first tool of that value to have a persistent strobing (scroll position) bug so bad that passersby ask me if I'm okay when they see it.

Man, I had never even put words to that problem but you are right that it is beyond annoying. It seems to me like it worsens the longer the Claude instance has run - I don't seem to see it early in the session.

ha I thought it was just a me thing and had have accepted my fate.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#386

Post by n2d4 »

mritchie712 wrote: post #68

> At the time of writing, Bun's monthly downloads grew 25% last month (October, 2025), passing 7.2 million monthly downloads. We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic. I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation. > Instead of putting our users & community through "Bun, the VC-backed startups tries to figure out monetizat…

    > They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.
This isn't really true. It's more about who wanted them to join. Maybe it was Anthropic who really wanted to take over Bun/hire Jarred, or it was Jarred who got sick of Bun and wanted to work on AI.

I don't really know any details about this acquisition, and I assume it's the former, but acquihires are also done for other reasons than "it was the only way".

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#387

Post by thatoneengineer »

bblaylock wrote: post #383

This reads more like Anthropic wanted to hire Jarred and Jarred wants to work with AI rather than build a Saas product around bun. I doubt it has anything to do with what is best for bun the project. Considering bun always seemed to value performance more than all else, the only real way for them to continue pursuing that value would be to move into the actual js engine design. This seems like a good pivot for Jarred…

Nah, it reads like the normal logic behind the consulting model for open source monetization, except that Bun was able to make it work with just one customer. Good for them, though it comes with some risks, especially when structured as an acquisition.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#388

Post by linkage »

Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

You said elsewhere that there were many suitors. What is the single most important thing about Anthropic that leads you to believe they will be dominant in the coming years?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#390

Post by simonw »

bblaylock wrote: post #383

This reads more like Anthropic wanted to hire Jarred and Jarred wants to work with AI rather than build a Saas product around bun. I doubt it has anything to do with what is best for bun the project. Considering bun always seemed to value performance more than all else, the only real way for them to continue pursuing that value would be to move into the actual js engine design. This seems like a good pivot for Jarred…

It doesn't read like that to me at all. This reads to me like Anthropic realizing that they have $1bn in annual revenue from Claude Code that's dependent on Bun, and acquiring Bun is a great and comparatively cheap way to remove any risk from that dependency.
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