Zig → Rust porting guide

Post by SergeAx » Tue, May 05, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

NewsaHackO wrote: post #82

SergeAx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people, me included, heavily invested their time and expertise into Bun, using it as a daily driver, to bundle production code or even using it in production as a JS/TS runtime. Of course, we are interested in Bun to stay a useful tool. The Anthropic acquisition was worrying enough on its own.

But there isn't any change in someone's expertise in Bun though, currently, just in development. Why would they have to dive you into a daily stand-up about their development process?

Post by user34283 » Tue, May 05, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #455

hardwaregeek wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you start getting hate, you’ve made it. Up until then you’re a hypothetical that people like. Maybe they’ve built a side project with you or read the docs. You only get hate when people have used your tool and butted up against limitations. We saw this with Deno too where they went from beloved potential savior to realistic, limited tool. Hate is good. It means people rely on you

Do you know which project gets the most hate? Nodejs, so in that sense, Nodejs has made it and it is widely deployed but this hate was the reason that two seperate alternatives for Node have emerged as Deno and bun. Recently Bun's latest version had memory leaks which crashed production code from my understanding and their attitude[0] of saying OSS will have no human contribution allowed, now doing these ports of zig…

Post by sucrosesucrose » Tue, May 05, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #372

neomantra wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One non-obvious reason is that an important aspect of their community is to shepherd new contributors [1]. LLMs crushing everything would reduce that. More obvious is all the toil for maintainers dealing with LLM PRs (broadly it’s an issue). The Zig maintainers prefer to put their energy into improving people and fostering those relationship. [1] https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/

It's important that developers have an accurate mental model of how things work, are structured and why. LLMs promote a decoupling of mental models and the actual codebase. As much as some may want to believe, just reviewing what the LLM outputs is not equivalent to thinking about implementation details, motivations, exactly how and why things are, and how and why they work the way they do, and then writing it yourse…

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, May 05, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

magicmicah85 wrote: post #462

mi_lk wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imaging title it "Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust in an experimental branch" though. Not enough drama with that

The branch name is "claude/phase-a-port", there was zero indication this was an experiment until Jarred commented. The more accurate title might have simply been "there is a branch in the official repo of bun describing a port to rust from zig". No amount of soft titles would have prevented the discussion. People have their opinions about Bun, about Zig, about Rust and it's all going to come out in a discussion board…

  The goal of Phase A is a **draft** `.rs` next to the `.zig`
  that captures the logic faithfully — it does **not** need to compile. Phase B
  makes it compile crate-by-crate.

Post by peesem » Tue, May 05, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #437

cropcirclbureau wrote: post #92

The only Bun shipped product I've used in anger is OpenCode and I regularly run into segfaults on it. I doubt this is the reason for migration but every time it happens, it reminds me the real cost of unsafe code. That being said, Zig is an absolute pleasure to write and I can't wait until it has a real library ecosystem, Rust's greatest boon.

How do you even run it with bun? I get nodejs not found error when running opencode command in terminal. I installed it via bun too.