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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

461–470 of 1001 posts

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#461
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One would expect that "AI tooling" is there for rapid iteration and one can use it with performant languages. We already had "rapid iteration" with GC languages.

If "AI tooling" makes developers more productive regardless of language, then it's still more productive to use a more productive language. If JS is more productive than C++, then "N% more productive JS" is still more productive than "N% more productive C++", for all positive N.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#462
post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

I've never personally used Bun. I use node.js I guess. What makes Bun fundamentally better at AI than, say, bundling a node.js app that can run anywhere?

If the answer is performance, how does Bun achieve things quicker than Node?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a non sequitur. Both Rust and Zig and any other language has the ability to end in an exception state. Whether it be kernel exception, pointer exception, or Rust's panic! - these things exist. The reason why you see so many GitHub issues about it is because that's where the development is. Deno is great. Bun is great. These two things can both be great and we don't have to choose sides. Deno has it's use case…

Don't make a false equivalence, how many times does one get a panic from Deno versus a segmentation fault in Bun? It's not a similar number, and it's simply wrong to say that both are just as unsafe when that's plainly untrue.

Anecodtally? Zero segfaults with bun since I started using it back in beta.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#466

Considering that 1) Bun is written in Zig, 2) Zig has a strict no-AI policy [1], and 3) Bun has joined Claude, it seems that Bun and Zig are increasingly culturally apart. [1] https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-pol...

> Bun and Zig are increasingly culturally apart

That's like saying GCC and NodeJS are culturally apart, as if that has significant bearing on either?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At an individual level, I think it is for some people. Opus/Sonnet 4.5 can tackle pretty much any ticket I throw at it on a system I've worked on for nearly a decade. Struggles quite a bit with design, but I'm shit at that anyway.

It's much faster for me to just start with an agent, and I often don't have to write a line of code. YMMV.

Sonnet 3.7 wasn't quite at this level, but we are now. You still have to know what you're doing mind you and there's a lot of ceremony in tweaking workflows, much like it had been for editors. It's not much different than instructing juniors.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#468
post #371
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Bun, Zig, and uWebsockets are passion projects run by individuals with deep systems programming expertise. furthest thing from vibe coding imaginable.

Sure, I definitely will not throw projects like Zig into that bucket, and I don't actually think Bun is vibe-coded. At least that _used_ to be true, we'll see I guess...

Don't read a snarky comment so literally ;)

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#469
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 t…

I am not your target with this question (I don't write Zig) but there is a spectrum of LLM usage for coding. It is possible to use LLMs extensively but almost never ship LLM generated code, except for tiny trivial functions. One can use them for ideation, quick research, or prototypes/starting places, and then build on that. That is how I use them, anyway

Culturally I see pure vibe coders as intersecting more with entrepreneurfluencer types who are non-technical but trying to extend their capabilities. Most technical folks I know are fairly disillusioned with pure vibe coding, but that's my corner of the world, YMMV

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