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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#801

Post by justatdotin »

miguelspizza wrote: post #734
chamomeal wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Clojure is such an underrated language for vibe coding for this very reason. Makes me wonder what a theoretical “best possible language for vibe coding” would look like

whoa, instant upgrade. thanks!

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#802

Post by justatdotin »

aizk wrote: post #781
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?

TS is enormous, has endless training data, and can interact with virtually anything on the Internet these days. Also, strong typing is very very useful for AI coding context.

> strong typing is very very useful for AI coding context

what makes you think so?

I believe strong typing is very very useful for human coding,

I'm not convinced its so 'very very' for agents.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#803

Post by dgroshev »

smj-edison wrote: post #667
dgroshev wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about exquisite and small. Bun genuinely made me doubt my understanding of what good software engineering is. Just take a look at their code, here are a few examples: - this hand-rolled JS parser of 24k dense, memory-unsafe lines: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/c42539b0bf5c067e3d085646... (this is a version from quite a while ago to exclude LLM impact) - hand-rolled re-implementation of S3 directory…

I can't speak as much about the last two examples, but writing a giant parser file is pretty common in Zig from what I've seen. Here's Zig's own parser, for example[1]. I'm also not sure what you mean by memory unsafe, since all slices have bounds checks. It also looks like this uses an arena allocator, so lifetime tracking is pretty simple (dump everything onto the allocator, and copy over the result at the end). Gr…

As it happens, the commit I linked fixes a segfault, which shouldn't normally happen in memory-safe code.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#804

Post by pjmlp »

GianFabien wrote: post #459
pier25 wrote: post #417

I wonder what this means for Deno. Will this make it more or less likely for people to use Bun vs Deno? And now that Bun doesn't need to run a profitable cloud company will they move faster and get ahead of Deno?

I think Deno's management have been somewhat distracted by their ongoing lawsuits with Oracle over the release of the Javascript trademark. I started out with Deno and when I discovered Bun, I pivoted. Personally I don't need the NodeJS/NPM compatability. Wish there was a Bun-lite which was freed of the backward compatability.

In regards to Deno, to me that means their business is not really flying and they need this kind of distractions instead.

Amount of people at big corps that care about their lawsuit, and would switch their IT guidelines from node to Deno due to such heroic efforts?

Zero.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#805

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

I'm not confused about the acquisition but about the investment. What were the investors thinking? This is an open source development tool with (to date), 0$ of revenue and not even the beginnings of a plan for getting such a thing.

The acquisition makes more sense. A few observations:

- no acquisition amount was announced. That indicates some kind of share swap where the investors change shares for one company into another. Presumably the founder now has some shares in Anthropic and a nice salary and vesting structure that will keep him on board for a while.

- The main investor was Kleiner Perkins. They are also an investor in Anthropic. 100M in the last round, apparently.

Everything else is a loosely buzzword compatible thingy for Anthropic's AI coding thingy and some fresh talent for their team. All good. But it's beside the point. This was an investor bailout. They put in quite a bit of money in Bun with exactly 0 remaining chance of that turning into the next unicorn. Whatever flaky plan there once might have been for revenue that caused them to invest, clearly wasn't happening. So, they liquidated their investment through an acquihire via one of their other investments.

Kind of shocking how easy it was to raise that kind of money with essentially no plan whatsoever for revenue. Where I live (Berlin), you get laughed away by investors (in a quite smug way typically) unless you have a solid plan for making them money. This wouldn't survive initial contact with due diligence. Apparently money still grows on trees in Silicon Valley.

I like Bun and have used it but from where I'm sitting there was no unicorn lurking there, ever.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#806

Post by wiseowise »

mrcsharp wrote: post #656
wiseowise wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 languag…

I’m not dismissing Java, I’ve spent decades writing it and know what it is capable of, but it is laughable to hear that average Java dev cares more about performance or correctness than Python/JS dev.

All of them explicitly don’t have to care about performance from the start because of VMs + GC, only when scale starts to matter you start to optimize.

Tooling argument is especially funny to me, given how shit tooling ecosystem is. Sure it is ol’ reliable, but average Java dev is so stuck in their ways that they’ve never even tried to dwell out of their Java cave to see what’s out there.

IntelliJ consuming ALL of RAM, literally as much as it can get hands on. Gradle taking what’s left, rebuilds taking minutes to complete or requiring elaborate setup to have proper hot reload. Both TS and Python have far more expressive and powerful type systems than even modern Java. “Production grade tooling” my ass.

Funny to see Java shmucks looking down at JS/Python folks, as if Java at the time wasn’t picked for literally same reasons as Python/JS nowadays.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#808

Post by bababuu »

I find it a little sad, that there is almost no pushback on what a few people with deep pockets are trying to sell here. Normaly on HN an article on balcon gardening would be met with more critical thinking than this piece. Maybe instead of staring to the screen all day long take a break, think about what people with lots of money care about. And I don't judge, making money is nothing illegal. But Anthropic would be absolutely NOTHING without OSS. And then to see the kind of this effusive, submissive admiration and gratitude for their js wrapper thing makes me sick to my stomach.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#809

Post by wiseowise »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #618
wiseowise wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Nonsense. Average Java/C# is an enterprise monkey who barely knows outside of their grotesque codebase. Netflix is Java. Amazon is mostly Java. Some of the biggest open source projects in the world are Java. Unity and Godot both use C# for scripting. I don't know where you're getting the impression that Java and C# are somehow only for "enterprise monkey who barely knows outside of their grotesque codebase"

> Netflix is Java. Amazon is mostly Java. Some of the biggest open source projects in the world are Java. Unity and Godot both use C# for scripting.

You can add Meta, Google and Palantir to your list and it won’t change that average Java dev is from an Eastern hemisphere and knows nothing about Java outside of JavaEE/Spring.

See how generalizations work?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#810

Post by OrangeMusic »

wiz21c wrote: post #796
yellow_lead wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java can run anywhere too

Java is owned by Oracle. And you sure don't want to do business with that company. There's a reason why postgresql is slowly eating their cake.

This is FUD. Java has many open source implementations and nobody needs to deal with Oracle.
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