Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 920 posts

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#441

Post by dd8601fn »

geraneum wrote: post #437
switz wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It largely works and it's a massive business success. This is the classic engineer asking the 'why this technology?' to what amounts to a business question. They chose it early on, it works, and it makes obscene amounts of revenue. End of story. That doesn't mean it was the "greatest" choice, or has a perfect technical architecture. Rewrites are never easy, even the bun rewrite. But a non-UI developer tool with a rig…

> It largely works and it's a massive business success. The engineer is suggesting that it could be done cheaper and maybe with better outcome. Ironically, this is a classic business case.

...while proving their technology has finally reduced these questions down to what's best, instead of "how much effort will it take to be good enough".

If you have unlimited access to the magical development tool, then why would you not?

But they haven't.

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#442

Post by lacy_tinpot »

coldtea wrote: post #295
switz wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It largely works and it's a massive business success. This is the classic engineer asking the 'why this technology?' to what amounts to a business question. They chose it early on, it works, and it makes obscene amounts of revenue. End of story. That doesn't mean it was the "greatest" choice, or has a perfect technical architecture. Rewrites are never easy, even the bun rewrite. But a non-UI developer tool with a rig…

> It largely works and it's a massive business success. This is the classic engineer asking the 'why this technology?' to what amounts to a business question. Your counter argument would be valid for a 2000 or a 2020 business decision about some tech stack. But the whole point of their product is that it supposedly nullifies such "business" concerns around the use of technology, by making it cheap and fast to build w…

>making it cheap and fast to build whatever you like automatically

This can be true, while "nullifies such "business" concerns" can be false. Both are not dependent on each other.

Automation doesn't "nullify business concerns", it just changes them.

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#443

Post by vmg12 »

anthk wrote: post #423
vmg12 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drawing to the terminal / rendering / whatever, this is all arguing semantics and very uninteresting and not insightful. > they need a high powered game engine rendering loop Don't believe the bs on twitter. Claude code source was leaked, there is no high powered game engine rendering loop. > It needs to stream text to stdout These apps are doing real work taking text that is streaming in and doing syntax highlightin…

Sorry, but nope; Golang there would be there a beast doing that in a much, much faster way. Not to mention C/C++ with NCurses.

> If you think this is actually nothing, prove it. Put the code up on github that shows taking a constant random stream of markdown, code, and diffs and displays it in the terminal can be done cheaply on a single thread.

Put up the code and prove it. We already know exactly how fast golang is in comparison to nodejs on basic numeric computations, it's roughly 40 to 50% faster.

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#444

Post by shafyy »

pdimitar wrote: post #342
coldtea wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It largely works and it's a massive business success. This is the classic engineer asking the 'why this technology?' to what amounts to a business question. Your counter argument would be valid for a 2000 or a 2020 business decision about some tech stack. But the whole point of their product is that it supposedly nullifies such "business" concerns around the use of technology, by making it cheap and fast to build w…

> But the whole point of their product is that it supposedly nullifies such "business" concerns around the use of technology, by making it cheap and fast to build whatever you like automatically. This is a spectrum, it's not just 0% vs 100%. Even Fable frakked up a few things really badly in my professional work (though to its credit after a very detailed 2h chat it self-corrected and fixed all the blunders). I would…

> Reminder that the Bun's Zig-to-Rust rewrite took 11 days with dozens of agents working 24/7 and the author put the cost they'd pay (if they had to pay) at about $168k.

Does anybody really believe that it only took 11 days, one engineer and $168k in tokens?

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#445

Post by jolux »

losvedir wrote: post #439
switz wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It largely works and it's a massive business success. This is the classic engineer asking the 'why this technology?' to what amounts to a business question. They chose it early on, it works, and it makes obscene amounts of revenue. End of story. That doesn't mean it was the "greatest" choice, or has a perfect technical architecture. Rewrites are never easy, even the bun rewrite. But a non-UI developer tool with a rig…

This reply makes no sense in this context, though. Sure, it exploded in popularity based on whatever random tech choices were made. But now, when apparently they're deciding there's a problem there, why unleash $150k of tokens to rewrite a JS runtime wrapper from Zig to a million lines of rust, rather than simply rewrite Claude Code itself to rust?

They probably should rewrite it in Rust, but also, I think the Bun guy wanted to rewrite it in Rust because he thinks Rust is a better choice for Bun, independent of Bun being used by Claude Code.

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#446

Post by tracerbulletx »

arijun wrote: post #340
KronisLV wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by making it cheap and fast to build whatever you like automatically. Cheaper, but not free (if you don't buy into the marketing promises too much). The bigger the project, the bigger the cost, even with a discount. At the same time, the early versions weren't very good and you can be sure that any rewrite will also need to be similarly iterated upon until it is also good enough and polished. If you do that and don…

Can't have been that cheap if they thought buying Bun for an undisclosed amount of money was cheaper.

I don't think they bought them just for the claude-code gui harness as it is now. it's to have strategic control over some software runtime they can use to do other things related to verification, deployment, and end to end value delivery. Same reason other companies are buying up dev tools.

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#447

Post by madeofpalk »

coldtea wrote: post #295
switz wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It largely works and it's a massive business success. This is the classic engineer asking the 'why this technology?' to what amounts to a business question. They chose it early on, it works, and it makes obscene amounts of revenue. End of story. That doesn't mean it was the "greatest" choice, or has a perfect technical architecture. Rewrites are never easy, even the bun rewrite. But a non-UI developer tool with a rig…

> It largely works and it's a massive business success. This is the classic engineer asking the 'why this technology?' to what amounts to a business question. Your counter argument would be valid for a 2000 or a 2020 business decision about some tech stack. But the whole point of their product is that it supposedly nullifies such "business" concerns around the use of technology, by making it cheap and fast to build w…

How much extra money do you think they would make if Claude Code wasn’t JavaScript?

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#448

Post by pdimitar »

shafyy wrote: post #444
pdimitar wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the whole point of their product is that it supposedly nullifies such "business" concerns around the use of technology, by making it cheap and fast to build whatever you like automatically. This is a spectrum, it's not just 0% vs 100%. Even Fable frakked up a few things really badly in my professional work (though to its credit after a very detailed 2h chat it self-corrected and fixed all the blunders). I would…

> Reminder that the Bun's Zig-to-Rust rewrite took 11 days with dozens of agents working 24/7 and the author put the cost they'd pay (if they had to pay) at about $168k. Does anybody really believe that it only took 11 days, one engineer and $168k in tokens?

I know what Fable did for just 5x6h sessions, singular agent, for my professional work.

Jarred used many agents and they worked 24/7. It tracks for me.

So yes, I do believe it. What makes you skeptical?

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#449

Post by keeganpoppen »

weakfish wrote: post #212

Maybe I’m taking crazy pills, but I’m still stuck on “why the hell does a TUI need to run in terminal React by way of JavaScript” The fact that Anthropic felt the need to buy a runtime so they could make their TUI better speaks more to the quality of engineering than anything else IMO. If rewrites are so easy, why not rewrite CC in a native language? Would’ve been a hell of a lot cheaper.

it is kinda mystifying bc from what i understand their engineering ethos is very much "if it's not working, just regenerate it" (which i completely understand).

Re: Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

#450

Post by redsocksfan45 »

vmg12 wrote: post #412
wild_egg wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the fundamental problem of these apps is that they are, for no reason, pretending they need a high powered game engine rendering loop. They don't. It's a text printout of history with some hotkeys for mode switches and such. "rendering in a single thread" should never be an issue because it should never be "rendering". It needs to stream text to stdout. That's been a solved problem for 50 years and now it takes 2…

Drawing to the terminal / rendering / whatever, this is all arguing semantics and very uninteresting and not insightful. > they need a high powered game engine rendering loop Don't believe the bs on twitter. Claude code source was leaked, there is no high powered game engine rendering loop. > It needs to stream text to stdout These apps are doing real work taking text that is streaming in and doing syntax highlightin…

[dead]
Post reply on HN