Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke • Hacker News Board

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#541

Post by dnautics » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:11 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #181

petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there. I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language becau…

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it. You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another langu…

> A true competitor would need to offer genuine extra value, such as dependent types or other formal verification features, to carve out a niche.

believe it or not it is generally easy to do this with zig with few modifications (WIP), and the team has said publically that they will be making this sort of thing a supported operation once the IR stabilizes post-1.0.

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr/

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#542

Post by randusername » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:12 PM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #390

I think the only point that matters is that having Anthropic owning a project which is written in a programming language where the community (or at least the leaders of it) have come out as openly hostile to AI generated code is a clear conflict of interest. I think Andrew Kelley might have been better to say just that and leave it - the comments about Bun's founders energy and motivations don't really add anything w…

Yeah, hard to imagine opposing AI absolutists settling their differences.

IMO all the technical arguments and attacks are post-rationalization; different orgs, different contexts, different goals.

I think Kelley saw this, but couldn't resist muddying his point. I give him a pass. The rant [0] is too much, but the addendum about moving on is healthy, and I'd rather the BDFL be too spicy than not spicy enough.

[0]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#543

Post by metoobruh » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:13 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #520

selfmodruntime wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the wrong abstraction though and I am kind of not surprised the Bun maintainers went way. The correct abstraction would be to translate into Rust while using `clone` and `copy` liberally and then iteratively converting to a borrowing model. Nowhere at all was an introduction of the `unsafe` keyword needed.

That's only the correct abstraction if you intended to hold off on releasing the rewrite until you were completely finished, because there's no universe where Bun of all projects releases a production version that uses clone and copy liberally. Unsafe in theory in a transliteration is only as unsafe as the original Zig was, which makes it a perfectly reasonable place to land as a transition point in a way that introd…

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Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#544

Post by Aurornis » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

wavemode wrote: post #508

Aurornis wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TigerBeetle has a unique static memory allocation strategy at launch time. It’s a strategy that sidesteps a lot of memory management issues but only works for very specific use cases. Their success with this strategy isn’t portable to most other projects. I think they really need more traditional flagship projects that generalize to typical memory management use cases. The way the conversation keeps coming back to Ti…

I would say the exact opposite, actually - Zig is a language specifically suited for TigerBeetle's all-at-once approach to memory management, and the approach more commonly used in Rust (allocate wherever and whenever) is non-idiomatic in Zig. > only works for very specific use cases. It's not clear to me what you mean by this.

> It's not clear to me what you mean by this.

TigerBeetle calculates all the memory it needs at startup. It allocates that much memory once. It does not allocate memory dynamically.

This only works for very specific use cases, like a fixed server size where you know exactly how much memory you want to allocate to a process.

It’s not portable to general purpose computing, where it’s expected that apps aren’t allocating the maximum amount of memory they might use at startup. Their memory usage grows and shrinks as you open and close files or as your documents get longer.

> and the approach more commonly used in Rust (allocate wherever and whenever) is non-idiomatic in Zig

Allocating memory as needed isn’t a Rust-specific idiom. Most programming involves dynamic memory allocation.

I don’t think the Zig developers would go as far as saying Zig isn’t a good fit for dynamic memory allocation. If it was that simple this entire debacle could have been written off as “Bun requires dynamic memory allocation by nature, therefore Zig isn’t a good fit”. That’s not what Andrew Kelley is trying to say though.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#545

Post by dnautics » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

budsniffer952 wrote: post #318

sph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…

> Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it. Yes. I'm as pro-AI coding as people come, but this is the part that bugs me too. If you whip something useful up in a weekend, great! But you don't have to present it like you are building an actual product. It's fine if no one else knows about it. Because the fact is, most…

building for yourself (or a few people) is amazing! and AI coding really makes this tractable.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#546

Post by cmrdporcupine » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #28

I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad…

I had this exact same reaction. Agreeing with the substance of the critique of approach etc but not at all its tone nor of the underlying elitism that lays there.

This is not how professionals behave in a profession.

Decorum actually matters.

Anthropic is doing bad stuff. They clearly have a broken internal engineering culture. Hence I don't use their products. But I expect to see this laid out in a structured argumentation that doesn't go after people and their personalities.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#547

Post by hughw » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244

sph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and…

I feel this too but it's very hard to argue myself out of adding features like mad. Features, features, features. Tech debt may be an illusion, if the LLM can keep maintaining it all.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#548

Post by whateveracct » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

hilariously wrote: post #368

Der_Einzige wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Then why don't you just eat soylent and drink tap water while using only your imagination? The medium is also part of the message.

heh you know a person with "carbon chauvinist" in their vocabularies already does just eat soylent

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#549

Post by lunar_mycroft » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #498

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also do one by using `unsafe` liberally, especially if you're flexible about actually upholding rust's rules (as the bun team just did). But either way, you're still stuck with a code base that's going to need extensive refactoring if you want to actually take advantage of rust.

Which is still a step ahead of Zig, which requires an entire rewrite to have the tiniest shred of RAII or borrow checking. What's your point, that if we can't do everything perfectly in one step we can't do it at all?

> Which is still a step ahead of Zig

First off, you seem to be under the impression I'm a rust hater. Noting could be further from the truth. Rust is easily my favorite language at this point, I reach for it for basically everything (except quick scripts). While I do like a lot of zig's philosophy, I think at the end of the day the empirical evidence is overwhelming that manual memory management isn't sufficient.

> What's your point, that if we can't do everything perfectly in one step we can't do it at all?

My point is exactly what I initially said: you typically aren't much closer to a (mostly) safe rust codebase if you've done a line by line port to (partially unsafe) rust than you were to start with. Getting to safe rust is very likely to require substantial refactors either way. This doesn't mean you shouldn't do it (on it's own), but it does mean that the bun team's strategy/assumptions are more questionable than they appear to realize.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#550

Post by metoobruh » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

gedy wrote: post #537

Lerc wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I think it is worse than that, the comments from people in threads about this suggest that this is an attitude that is creeping into the community. They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a mor…

> They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a more welcoming community Given the context, you mean Rust? Nothing against Rust folks but I wouldn't really call it more welcoming community.

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