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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

#541

Post by crabmusket »

andrew_ wrote: post #113
orangeisthe wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the problem in moving to codeberg?

the loss of network effect.

What I assume you mean is not the network effect, where more users of a product makes the product more valuable. That's still true for Zig as more users increase the ecosystem, funding potential etc. regardless of where the compiler source lives.

I think you mean to say something like barrier to entry for contributors? Where having to sign up for a new service will discourage some engagement with the core repo.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#542

Post by lerno »

orangeisthe wrote: post #80
hazn wrote: post #39

Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack. Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance: 1) It's hardcore Anti-AI 2) It's moved to Codeberg 3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselve…

what's the problem in moving to codeberg?

One funny thing is that if you go on codeberg and want to submit a PR to Zig, you can't. Because Zig's too big for Codeberg, and you're over your free quota, so you can't push your update to your fork.

Yes there are ways around it if you have patience, but what the heck!!

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#544

Post by dom96 »

dpatterbee wrote: post #404
orangedog wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Zig for years. Is this not a discussion forum?

My apologies, your previous comment read to me as "I have engaged, I just read this blog post". I now see what you intended. I've realised from the comments under this post that many people seem to desire some sort of performative "professional" communication style from people above all else. I don't know why people care about this so much and I don't think I care to know.

I know you said you don't care to know. But for others wondering: being professional is important because it reduces conflict. Having a leader of the language personally insult someone like this makes the community feel that it is okay to insult others in the community too.

Personally I find it hard to believe that a community isn't toxic when their leader acts in this way.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#545

Post by krupan »

soerxpso wrote: post #498
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also know nothing of the drama, but what I picked up from the first blog post was that even with access to near unlimited funds and unreleased god-tier coding llms from a trillion dollar AI corporation it was apparently impossible to fix a backlog of bugs in Zig code but it was possible to fix them by automatically doing a rewrite in rust. I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if star…

> I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is. The original post explicitly praised Zig, and seemed to be arguing more that Zig was a great tool for the initial version of Bun, but that Rust was better for their needs as Bun grew to a larger project with a larger contribution team. That seems completely in line with what Zig claims its strengths are…

It explicitly praised zig and then spent a long time implicitly damning it. The whole blog post said in short, "zig is awesome, but it's use led to endless memory related bugs in the bun code that we couldn't stay on top of, so we rewrote in Rust."

If you didn't catch that then I'm not sure we read the same article. I haven't gone past basic tutorials in either language and I was really starting to believe that zig must be worse than C or C++! After thinking about it for a minute I wondered if maybe the developer was actually, well, not very good. Andrew's blog post did a lot to explain to me the background behind this all. I really appreciated it.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#546

Post by dom96 »

f311a wrote: post #140
hazn wrote: post #39

Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack. Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance: 1) It's hardcore Anti-AI 2) It's moved to Codeberg 3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselve…

They don't have a goal of becoming a popular language, though and will continue to work on it as long as there are donations. They don't care about being mainstream and there are niche companies who appreciate Zig and donate.

Reminds me of another language that I used to know...

For real though, if your goal as a language isn't to become popular then why should anyone learn it? Why should anyone spend their limited time building libraries in it when the language isn't likely to grow (and thus is more likely to disappear)?

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#547

Post by pier25 »

cyber1 wrote: post #14

To me, this whole effort of rewriting Bun from Zig to Rust looks like a big marketing move. The question is: if Anthropic AI is really that powerful, why not just fix the bugs and give it the more ambitious task of redesigning the existing Bun Zig codebase in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future?

Well either Claude cannot fix those bugs or it can but the Bun team decided to not fix those bugs on purpose.

Not sure which is worse.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#548

Post by slopinthebag »

semiquaver wrote: post #261
speedster217 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Real engineers don’t eschew powerful engineering tools because of what their political tribe says about them.

Real engineers aren't vibe coding. Please don't mistake Bun, Claude Code, web development et al, etc, as "engineering".

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#549

Post by bel8 »

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!

I would love to have an unprofessional embarrassment project like Bun on my portfolio.

Re: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

#550

Post by krupan »

afavour wrote: post #254
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…

> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig I'm not sure that's his aim here. I imagine he has been asked dozens of times what he thinks about the switch, what it means for Zig, etc. etc. and wanted to just address it one time, which is understandable. The tone is... strong. I think repeating grapevine rumours about Jarred's management skills adds very little and probably could have be…

There are entire businesses built on sharing "through the grapevine" what management style and working conditions are like at various employers. People want to know these things!

Instead of posting on Glassdoor or whatever the latest iteration of that is, Andrew just wrote it out here (and linked to a forum to back up the claim).

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