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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#541
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either for a modest return when it sells or as a tax write off when it fails.

VCs do not invest for a modest return.

No, but faced with either a loss or a modest return, they'll take the modest return (unless it's more beneficial to not come tax season). Unicorns are called unicorns for a reason.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note that "sandboxing" in this case is strictly runtime sandboxing - it's basically like having a separate process per event loop (as if you ran separate Node processes). It does not sandbox the machine context in which it runs (i.e. it's not VM-level containment).

When you say runtime sandboxing, are you referring to JavaScript agents? I haven't worked all that much with JavaScript execution environments outside of the browser so I'm not sure about what sandboxing mechanics are available.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note that "sandboxing" in this case is strictly runtime sandboxing - it's basically like having a separate process per event loop (as if you ran separate Node processes). It does not sandbox the machine context in which it runs (i.e. it's not VM-level containment).

Running it in a chroot or a scoped down namespace is all your need most of the time anyways.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This matches some previous comments around LLMs driving adoption of programming languages or frameworks. If you ask Claude to write a web app, why not have it use your own framework, that it was trained on, by default?

Users are far more likely to ask it about shadcn, or material, than about node/deno/bun. So, what is this about?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#545

As someone who have been using Deno for the last few years, is there anything that Bun does better? Bun seems to use a different runtime (JSC) which is less tested than V8, which makes me assume it might perform worse in real-world tasks (maybe not anymore?). The last time I checked Bun's source code, it was... quite messy and spaghetti-like, plus Zig doesn't really offer many safety features, so it's not that hard t…

Looking at Bun's website (the comparison table under "What's different about Bun?") and what people have said here, the only significant benefit of Bun over Node.js seems to be that it's more batteries-included - a bigger standard library, more tools, some convenience features like compiling JSX and stripping TypeScript types on-the-fly, etc.

It's not clear to me why that requires creating a whole new runtime, or why they made the decisions they did, like choosing JSC instead of V8, or using a pre-1.0 language like Zig.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#546
post #537
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…

Yea, they just posted this a few days ago: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use They discussed how running generated code is better for context management in many cases. The AI can generate code to retrieve, process, and filter the data it needs rather than doing it in-context, thus reducing context needs. Furthermore, if you can run the code right next to the server where the data is, it's all tha…

Java can run anywhere too

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#547
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Anthropic need Bun to be healthy because they use it for Claude Code.

Isn't that still "acqui-hiring" according to common usage of the term? Sometimes people use the term to mean that the buyer only wants some/all of the employees and will abandon or shut down the acquired company's product, which presumably isn't the case here. But more often I see "acqui-hire" used to refer to any acquisition where the expertise of the acquired company are the main reason to the acquisition (rather t…

Acquihiring usually means that the product the team are working on will be ended and the team members will be set to work on other aspects of the existing company.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It also has TypeScript which pairs well with agentic coding loops The language syntax has nothing to do with it pairing well with agentic coding loops. Considering how close Typescript and C# are syntactically, and C#'s speed advantage over JS among many other things would make C# the main language for building Agents. It is not and that's because the early SDKs were JS and Python.

Typescript is probably generally a good LLM language because - static types - tons and tons of training data

Kind of tangent but I used to think static types were a must-have for LLM generated code. But the most magical and impressively awesome thing I’ve seen for LLM code generation is “calva backseat driver”, a vscode extension that lets copilot evaluate clojure expressions and generally do REPL stuff.

It can write MUCH cleaner and more capable code, using all sorts of libraries that it’s unfamiliar with, because it can mess around and try stuff just like a human would. It’s mind blowingly cool!!

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#549
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.

AI are good at JS because basically there is a ton of JS code available publicly without usage restriction: the JS code published to be executed in your browser. Most of JS code attached to web pages has no explicit license, but the implicit license is that anyone can download it and run it. Same for HTML and CSS. So using that public code to train models is a no brainer.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#550
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…

>Claude will be able to leverage these capabilities to extend its reach across the cloud and add more value in enterprise use cases

100%. even more robust if paired with an overlay network which provides identity based s3 access (rather than ip address/network based). else server may not have access to s3/cloud resource, at least for many enterprises with s3 behind vpn/direct connect.

ditto for cases when want agent/client side to hit s3 directly, bypassing the server, and agent/client may not have permitted IP in FW ACL, or be on vpn/wan.

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