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My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

andrewkelley.me

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Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#501

Post by tomjakubowski »

afiori wrote: post #202
roetlich wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the discussion started with a the article from Bun, stating that rust has some technical advantages for them. The response from the Zig creator is a bunch of personal attacks directed at one guy, like calling him a stinky manager. All of these are fully unrelated to which language is better for Bun. This is like the textbook definition of an ad hominem.

To be pedantic the ad hominem fallacy is about trying to deny an argument by attacking the author, so in a discussion about zig Vs rust if Andrew isn't trying to enter the discussion and just argue "that guy was stinky, glad he is gone" is not really an ad hominem, just not classy let's say.

You're both right: the essay does not really contain ad hominem fallacies, but the essay itself is surely an ad hominem attack, on Jarred as a person. No judgment here, I don't know Jarred or Andrew at all, but like other commenters I did find the closing paragraphs saying the author has no ill-will towards Jarred quite unbelievable.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#502

Post by dminik »

bananaquant wrote: post #460
dataflow wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious. Nobody is conflating anything, you're just misinterpreting the same words with different meanings. A professional criticism can, in fact, be unprofessional, and even a personal attack. These are not mutually exclusive. > Those are not personal criticisms You're using "per…

> others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves" Following your logic, we cannot critique anyone in particular ever. How absurd! > You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional". At the end of the day, it is the same thing. Person does what is their job according to common standards. Andrew…

Oh, you can actually. But you have to bring receipts, otherwise it very well could be libel.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#503

Post by threatofrain »

hoppp wrote: post #429
threatofrain wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While organizing his thoughts publicly, Andrew says that the Bun team at large engages in outright fabrication. What do we think about that? Does Jarred and his team lie about professional matters to fellow peers in the field?

Maybe their concept of fuzzing is different? Jarred commented on the top that they use fuzzilli , which is a javascript engine fuzzer. But zig has a built in integrated fuzzer! Andrew must have been talking about the built in fuzzer because that's what is associated with zig. zig build test --fuzz

The fact that Bun is the face of Zig owes to (1) its popularity in the relatively enormous web ecosystem and (2) that there aren't many winners in Zig. This means Bun leaving and rewriting to Rust, no matter how its phrased by any of the major parties, was always going to be alternatively reframed as one of the few major proponents of Zig leaving for Rust.

That's why this is a PR moment for Zig.

It's not because Jarred was a bad manager, one who overworks his team, a poor communicator, one who doesn't develop intimacy with the internal core team at Zig, an amateur coder, or a liar about whether or not they've been fuzzing.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#504

Post by wegwerper »

conartist6 wrote: post #171
tuckwat wrote: post #101

This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig. I know very little about Jared but his article yesterday, which I read, seemed appreciative of Zig. I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them. This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product. It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look chil…

"An unprofessional embarrassment" is exactly how I feel about Bun. I don't get mad at people for standing up for their morals, I get mad when they have none. AI is an a-moral tech, and Bun is using it in an a-moral way: for team Bun the ends justify any means. I'm on team Zig!

Agree with you.

This behaviour by the commentariat here on HN seems more like a reflexive revulsion at the discovering of humans with ideals other than money on this globe.

This of course leads to strong internal conflict - it becomes harder to accept yourself not having any morals when confronted by someone pointing it out. Easily resolved by the ego by disparaging the boss of zed instead.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#505

Post by mathisfun123 »

taybin wrote: post #224
tuckwat wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have bias? I'm not saying I don't have some hidden bias but I have no skin in the game. I don't use Bun or Zig or plan to. My reflection comes after reading Jarred's post yesterday, which I found interesting, and then Andrew's today. I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone and the summary is: > The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor an…

Did you have a hard time picking that up from the article itself? I don’t see the point of asking an LLM to tell you what to feel about the article.

an enormous number of people have never taken a literature class and in fact have no idea how to assess tone, diction, rhetorical purpose, etc.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#506

Post by demilicious »

vmg12 wrote: post #102

> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. I was on a platform team and I had a constant backlog of bugs (introduced by others) that I was working on and the two most impactful things for preventing bugs were Typescript and Cypress (playwright-like testing before playwright). I've dealt with many shitty code bases and the only way…

> I've dealt with many shitty code bases and the only way that worked for removing bugs was automation. It didn't matter how many bodies you threw at the problem.

Can't say my experience matches yours. Types do seem to structurally reduce some varieties of bugs, but ultimately the only reliable way I've seen to close the gap is hire disciplined people who care about, and thoughtfully consider, what they build.

E.g., the shittiest codebases I've ever seen were TypeScript. It in no way prevents you writing bugs or slop

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#507

Post by mungaihaha »

coffeeaddict1 wrote: post #54
SuperV1234 wrote: post #9

> The main problem, however, was code quality. > The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. Perhaps the amount of bugs comes from using a C-like language that requires meticulous manual care to avoid writing runtime bugs. Even C++ would be a safer choice because of RAII. When you have to dedicate significant resources to avoid/fix r…

C++ would also introduce a myriad other subtle safety problems that would require years of expertise to even notice.

I'd like to see an example

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#508

Post by mungaihaha »

nicce wrote: post #85
skydhash wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve not seen any languages that does not require meticulous care to avoid runtime bugs. Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.

> Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them. They actually remove certain classes completely. E.g. lifetime ownership in Rust removes all bugs related to the reason why it is in the code syntax (a.k.a. lifetime markers remove use-after-free completely in Rust.)

Almost like how RAII in C++ does it?

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#509

Post by demilicious »

suis_siva wrote: post #469

Ex-Bun employee for transparency. I have skin in the game. I respect andrewrk and Jarred in different ways. My understanding are that neither are media trained. Very patronizing post from andrewrk and shows his hostility towards Jarred. I mostly agree with the core meat and potatoes of his post, but the hostile tone, the snarky VC-related remarks, the fact that *most* of his comments felt like a defensive remark. Yes…

Why must every language have every feature, mass applicability, and be intended to be the language-to-end-all-languages? Growth or marketshare is not the only valuable aim.

If you want mutable data structures, I wouldn't point you to Haskell.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#510

Post by nickmonad »

carllerche wrote: post #380

Sounds like Andrew is using the same argument as Bjarne Stroustrup: if you use it right, you don't write bugs. It hasn't really worked out for C++.

He's not.

> "There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. You're not giving TigerBeetle nearly enough credit. Quite simply they put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an effort to maintain a healthy relationship with ZSF, and Bun did not do that."

The reference to TigerBeetle is important, and a bit under-explained for the point he's trying to make. They have consistently attributed things like design and deterministic simulation testing to their success and reliability, which has nothing to do with Zig as a language. Some things might be _easier_ in Zig, such as static memory allocation, but ultimately, a holistic approach brings success, not one individual tool used "right".

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