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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#441

Post by cobolcomesback »

_jab wrote: post #423
simonw wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This argument doesn’t make much sense to me. Claude Code, like any product, presumably has dozens of external dependencies. What’s so special about Bun specifically that motivated an acquisition?

A dependency that forms the foundation of your build process, distribution mechanisms, and management of other dependencies is a materially different risk than a dependency that, say, colorizes terminal output.

I’m doubtful that alone motivated an acquisition, it was surely a confluence of factors, but Bun is definitely a significant dependency for Claude Code.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#442

Post by skybrian »

kenhwang wrote: post #301
skybrian wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to download open source libraries to be used in your Bun project then they will come from npm, at least by default. [1]. So it seems odd to say that Bun is less dependent on the npm library ecosystem. [1] It’s possible to use jsr.io instead: https://jsr.io/docs/using-packages

Yes, both can pull in open source libraries and I can't imagine either dropping that ability. Though they do seem to have different eagerness and competency on Node compatibility and Bun seems better on that front. From a long term design philosophy prospective, Bun seems to want to have a sufficiently large core and standard library where you won't need to pull in much from the outside. Code written for Node will ru…

That’s true of some parts of Deno’s standard libraries, but major functionality like Deno.test and Deno.serve are Deno-specific API’s.

Here are the Bun API’s:

https://bun.com/docs/runtime/bun-apis

Here are the Deno API’s:

https://docs.deno.com/api/deno/

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#443

Post by almosthere »

fishmicrowaver wrote: post #403
Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

Yeah why are you not out on a boat somewhere enjoying this moment? Go have fun please.

Acq's typically have additional stips you have to follow - they probably have new deadlines and some temporary stress for the next few months.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#444

Post by whizzter »

nailer wrote: post #64
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!

One important original point of node was that v8 made JS very fast by compiling to machine code, plus it’s had multithreading built in for a decade.

Machine code yes (along with Spidermonkey, JSC and Nashorn), the timeframe around 2005-2010 saw the introduction of JIT'ed JS runtimes. Back then however JS was firmly single-threaded, it was only with the introduction of SharedArrayBuffer that JS really started to receive multithreading features (outside of SharedArrayBuffer and other shareable/sendable types, a runtime could opt to run stuff like WebWorkers/WebAudioWorkers in separate processes).

Early Node f.ex. had a multi-process setup built in, Node initially was about pushing the async-IO model together with a fast JS runtime.

Why Bun (and partially Deno) exists is because TypeScript helps so damn much once projects gets a tad larger, but usage with Node hot-reloading was kinda slow, multiple seconds from saving a file until your application reloads. Even mainline node nowadays has direct .ts file loading and type erasing to quicken the workflow.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#446

Post by losvedir »

Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

I'm sort of surprised to see that you used Claude Code so much. I had a vague idea that "Zig people" were generally "Software You Can Love" or "Handmade Software Movement" types, about small programs, exquisitely hand-written, etc, etc. And I know Bun started with an extreme attention to detail around performance.

I would have thought LLM-generated code would run a bit counter to both of those. I had sort of carved the world into "vibe coders" who care about the eventual product but don't care so much about the "craft" of code, and people who get joy out of the actual process of coding and designing beautiful abstractions and data structures and all that, which I didn't really think worked with LLM code.

But I guess not, and this definitely causes me to update my understanding of what LLM-generated code can look like (in my day to day, I mostly see what I would consider as not very good code when it comes from an LLM).

Would you say your usage of Claude Code was more "around the edges", doing things like writing tests and documentation and such? Or did it actually help in real, crunchy problems in the depths of low level Zig code?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#447

Post by littlestymaar »

supern0va wrote: post #56
phantasmish wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no reader of tech news will take an acquisition of a company with four years of runway as anything but decreasing the odds their product will still be around (and useful to the same audience…) in four years. Even without being tied to a company with lots of exposure to a probable bubble.

How so? Presumably Jarred got a nice enough payout that if Anthropic failed, he would not need to work. At that point, he's more than welcome to take the fully MIT licensed Bun and fork it to start another company or just continue to work on it himself if he so chooses.

> At that point, he's more than welcome to take the fully MIT licensed Bun and fork it to start another company or just continue to work on it himself if he so chooses.

Is there any historical precedent of someone doing that?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#448

Post by rco8786 »

simonw wrote: post #390
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.

Except bun is OSS, so they could have just forked if something happened

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#449

Post by jomohke »

rglover wrote: post #215
rsyring wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for the quote?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Shl1-ZJI6E

Is this why everyone only seems to know the first half of Dario's quote? The guy in that video is commenting on a 40 second clip from twitter, not the original interview.

I posted a link and transcription of the rest of his "three to six months" quote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126784

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#450

Post by n42 »

defen wrote: post #244
pjmlp wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, the language would be interesting during the 1990's, nowadays not so much. The tools that the language offers to handle use after free is hardly any different from using Purify, Insure++ back in 2000.

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…

Don't engage with this guy, he shows up in every one of these threads to pattern match back to his heyday without considering any of the nuance of what is actually different this time.
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