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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#501

Post by chatmasta »

hoppp wrote: post #497
dts wrote: post #395

A lot of people seem confused about this acquisition because they think of Bun as a node.js compatible bundler / runtime and just compare it to Deno / npm. But I think its a really smart move if you think of where Bun has been pushing into lately which is a kind of cloud-native self contained runtime (S3 API, SQL, streaming, etc). For an agent like Claude Code this trajectory is really interesting as you are creating…

It's fine but why is Js a good language for agents? I mean sure its faster than python but wouldn't something that compiles to native be much better?

JS has the fastest, most robust and widely deployed sandboxing engines (V8, followed closely by JavaScriptCore which is what Bun uses). It also has TypeScript which pairs well with agentic coding loops, and compiles to the aforementioned JavaScript which can run pretty much anywhere.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#503

Post by shrubble »

There's no reason to run agents on expensive AI platforms or on GPUs - when you can have the AI create an agent in JS and thus runs with very high performance and perfect repeatability on far less expensive CPUs.

At the very least there must be some part of the agent tasks that can be run in JS, such as REST APIs, fetching web results, parsing CSV into a table, etc.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#504

Post by ants_everywhere »

dts wrote: post #395

A lot of people seem confused about this acquisition because they think of Bun as a node.js compatible bundler / runtime and just compare it to Deno / npm. But I think its a really smart move if you think of where Bun has been pushing into lately which is a kind of cloud-native self contained runtime (S3 API, SQL, streaming, etc). For an agent like Claude Code this trajectory is really interesting as you are creating…

The writeup makes it sound like an acquihire, especially the "what changes" part.

ChatGPT is feeling the pressure of Gemini [0]. So it's a bit strange for Anthropic to be focusing hard on its javascript game. Perhaps they see that as part of their advantage right now.

[0] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/goo...

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#505

Post by hoppp »

piskov wrote: post #493

Genuine question: why js? Why not something like c#: native, fast, crossplatform, strongly-typed, great tooling, supports both scripting (ie single file-based) and compiled to a binary with no dependency whatsoever (nativeAOT), great errors and error stacks, list goes on. All great for AI to recover during its iterations of generating something useful. Genuinely perplexed.

Because js became an everything language that everyone can write and its the only language you ever need.

I dislike it also..

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#506

Post by [deleted] »

dts wrote: post #395

A lot of people seem confused about this acquisition because they think of Bun as a node.js compatible bundler / runtime and just compare it to Deno / npm. But I think its a really smart move if you think of where Bun has been pushing into lately which is a kind of cloud-native self contained runtime (S3 API, SQL, streaming, etc). For an agent like Claude Code this trajectory is really interesting as you are creating…

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#507

Post by AstroBen »

hoppp wrote: post #497
dts wrote: post #395

A lot of people seem confused about this acquisition because they think of Bun as a node.js compatible bundler / runtime and just compare it to Deno / npm. But I think its a really smart move if you think of where Bun has been pushing into lately which is a kind of cloud-native self contained runtime (S3 API, SQL, streaming, etc). For an agent like Claude Code this trajectory is really interesting as you are creating…

It's fine but why is Js a good language for agents? I mean sure its faster than python but wouldn't something that compiles to native be much better?

It's widespread and good enough. The language just doesn't matter that much in most cases

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#508

Post by jorblumesea »

dts wrote: post #395

A lot of people seem confused about this acquisition because they think of Bun as a node.js compatible bundler / runtime and just compare it to Deno / npm. But I think its a really smart move if you think of where Bun has been pushing into lately which is a kind of cloud-native self contained runtime (S3 API, SQL, streaming, etc). For an agent like Claude Code this trajectory is really interesting as you are creating…

That's a really cool use case and seems super helpful. working cloud native is a chore sometimes. having to fiddle with internal apis, acl/permissions issues.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#509

Post by awesome_dude »

shrubble wrote: post #503

There's no reason to run agents on expensive AI platforms or on GPUs - when you can have the AI create an agent in JS and thus runs with very high performance and perfect repeatability on far less expensive CPUs. At the very least there must be some part of the agent tasks that can be run in JS, such as REST APIs, fetching web results, parsing CSV into a table, etc.

Am I missing something - I thought that GPUs are for training the weights

Being able to create an agent in any language to run on any hardware has always been possible hasn't it?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#510

Post by shwaj »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #359
mgfist wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you understand the bet Anthropic is making, and why it's a bit different than selling dollars at a discount

Maybe for those of us not-too-clever ones, what is the bet? Why is it different? Would be pretty great to have like a clear articulation of this!

The bet, (I would have thought) obviously, is that AI will be a huge part of humanity’s future, and that Anthropic will be able to get a big piece of that pie.

This is (I would have thought) obviously different from selling dollars for $0.50, which is a plan with zero probability of profit.

Edit: perhaps the question was meant to be about how Bun fits in? But the context of this sub-thread has veered to achieving a $7 billion revenue.

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