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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#551

Post by Karrot_Kream »

robertjpayne wrote: post #440
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation. Did they? I see a $7MM seed round in 2022. Now to be clear that's a great seed round and it looks like they had plenty of traction. But it's unclear to me how they were going to monetize enough to justify their $7MM investment. If they continued with the consultancy model, they would need to pay back investors from contracts they negotiate with other…

They had a second round that was $19m in late 2023. I don't doubt for a second that they had a long runway given the small team.

Thanks I scrolled past that in the announcement page.

With more runway comes more investor expectations too though. Some of the concern with VC backed companies is whether the valuation remains worthwhile. $26mm in funding is plenty for 14 people, but again the question is whether they can justify their valuation.

Regardless happy for the Oven folks and Bun has been a great experience (especially for someone who got on the JS ecosystem quite late.) I'm curious what the structure of the acquisition deal was like.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#552

Post by throwawaymaths »

yellow_lead wrote: post #546
ok_dad wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

run code anywhere hamstrung by 90s syntax and hidden code indirections

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#553

Post by bodge5000 »

Tiberium wrote: post #35

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…

I really want to like Deno and will likely try it again, but last time I did it was just a bit of a pain anytime I wanted to use something built for npm (which is most packages out there), whereas bun didn't have that problem.

There's certainly an argument to be made that, like any good tool, you have to learn Deno and can't fall back on just reusing node knowledge, and I'd absolutely agree with that, but in that case I wanted to learn the package, not the package manager.

Edit: Also it has a nice standard library, not a huge win because that stuff is also doable in Deno, but again, its just a bit less painless

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#554

Post by wiseowise »

yellow_lead wrote: post #546
ok_dad wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not in the browser, and no – webassembly doesn't count, otherwise you can say the same about Go and others.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#555

Post by moron4hire »

AstroBen wrote: post #507
hoppp wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is one of those, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is" issues.

In their, quality software can be written in any programming language.

In practice, folks who use Python or JavaScript as their application programming language start from a position of just not carrying very much about correctness or performance. Folks who use languages like Java or C#, do. And you can see the downstream effects of this in the difference in the production-grade developer experience and the quality of packages on offer in PIP and NPM versus Maven and NuGet.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#557

Post by wiseowise »

mrcsharp wrote: post #532
chatmasta wrote: post #501

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.

> C#'s speed advantage over JS among many other things would make C# the main language

Nobody cares about this, JS is plenty fast for LLM needs. If maximum performance was necessary, you're better off using Go because of fast compiler and better performance.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#558

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

As a commandline end user who prefers to retreive data from the www as text-only, I see deno and bun as potential replacements (for me, not necessarily for anyone else) for the so-called "modern" browser in those rare cases where I need to interpret Javascript^1

At present the browser monstrosity is used to (automatically, indiscriminantly) download into memory and run Javascripts from around the web. At least with a commandline web-capable JS runtime monstrosity the user could in theory exercise more control over what scripts are downloaded and if and when to run them. Perhaps more user control over permissions to access system resources as well (cf. corporate control)

1. One can already see an approach something like this being used in the case of

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS

where a commandline JS runtime is used without the need for any graphics layer (advertising display layer)

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#559

Post by wiseowise »

moron4hire wrote: post #555
AstroBen wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is one of those, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is" issues. In their, quality software can be written in any programming language. In practice, folks who use Python or JavaScript as their application programming language start from a position of just not carrying very much about correctness or performance. Folks who use languages like Java or C#, do. And you can…

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