Anthropic acquires Bun • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#651

Post by fishmicrowaver » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:48 AM UTC

MasterScrat wrote: post #629

fishmicrowaver wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask, what is this obsession with targeting the browser? I've also noticed a hatred of k8s here, and while I truly understand it, I'd take the complication of managing infrastructure over frontend fads any day.

HN has a hatred of K8s? That’s new to me

This is a site for startups. They have no business running k8s, in fact, many of the lessons learned get passed on from graybeards to the younger generation along those lines. Perhaps I'm wrong! I'd love to talk shop somewhere.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#652

Post by morshu9001 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:49 AM UTC

simpsond wrote: post #324

TekMol wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone could offer a cloud-hosted saas product that involves bun, right? Why invest into a company that has the additional burden of developing bun, why not in a company that does only the hosting?

Hosting is a commodity. Runtimes are too. In this case, the strategy is to make a better runtime, attract developers, and eventually give them a super easy way to run their project in the cloud. Eg: bun deploy, which is a reserved no op command. I really like Buns DX.

Yep. This strategy can work, and it has also backfired before, like with Docker trying to monetize something they gave away for free.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#653

Post by School-Cotton » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:50 AM UTC

kylecarbs wrote: post #37

Bun has completely changed my outlook on the JS ecosystem. Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance. Now the entire space rallies around it. Congrats to Jarred and the team!

> Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance

v8 is one of the most advanced JIT runtimes in the world. A lot of people have spent a lot of time focusing on its performance.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#654

Post by alexandre_m » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:52 AM UTC

elktown wrote: post #389

Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

Is this acquihiring?

I consider this more of a strategic acquisition.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#655

Post by terryds » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:54 AM UTC

Wow.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#656

Post by mrcsharp » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:54 AM UTC

wiseowise wrote: post #559

moron4hire wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Chill out buddy. You're going to pop a vein here.

A typical backend developer using C#/Java is likely solving more complicated problems and having all the concerns of an enterprise system to worry about and maintain.

Dismissing a dev or a system because it is enterprisy is a weak argument to make against a language. A language being used a lot in an enterprise to carry the weight of the business is a sign the language is actually great and reliable enough.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#657

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:55 AM UTC

mritchie712 wrote: post #68

> At the time of writing, Bun's monthly downloads grew 25% last month (October, 2025), passing 7.2 million monthly downloads. We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic. I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation. > Instead of putting our users & community through "Bun, the VC-backed startups tries to figure out monetizat…

"We were maybe gonna fuck ya, buy now we promise we wont"

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#658

Post by Wowfunhappy » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:56 AM UTC

qjack wrote: post #533

Anthropic has been trying to win the developer marketshare, and has been quite successful with Claude Code. While I understand the argument that this acquisition is to protect their usage in CC or even just to acquire the team, I do hope that part of their goal is to use this to strengthen their brand. Being good stewards of open source projects is a huge part of how positively I view a company.

> Being good stewards of open source projects is a huge part of how positively I view a company.

Maybe an easier first step would be to open source Claude Code...?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#659

Post by drzaiusx11 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:57 AM UTC

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…

As a developer that switches between java, python and typescript every day I think this is fairly myopic opinion. Being siloed to one lang for long enough tends to brings out our tribalistic tendencies, tread carefully.

I've seen codebases of varying quality in nearly every language, "enterprise" and otherwise. I've worked at a C# shop and it was no better or worse than the java/kotlin/typescript ones I've worked at.

You can blame the "average" developer in a language for "not caring ", but more likely than not you're just observing the friction imposed by older packaging systems. Modern languages are usually coupled with package managers that make it trivial to publish language artifacts to package hubs, whereas gradle for example is it's own brand of hell just to get your code to build.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#660

Post by centur » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:58 AM UTC

wrboyce wrote: post #640

yellow_lead wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java can run anywhere too

It’s relevant enough that I feel I can roll out this bash.org classic… Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders EDIT: someone has (much to my joy) made an archive of bash.org so here is a link[1], but I must say I’m quite jealous of today’s potential 1/10,000[2] who will discover bash.org from my comment! [1] https://bash-org-archive.co…

Not discovered from scratch, but was a big fan when it was alive and kicking. Went there from time to time to get some mood boosters. So was very sad when found that it's gone (original one). Thanks a lot for sharing that bash-org-archive.com exists, what a great fun going down this memory lane.