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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#901

Post by fnands »

hinkley wrote: post #350

I wonder if this is a sign of AI companies trying to pivot? > Bun will ship faster. That'll last until FY 2027. This is an old lie that acquirers encourage the old owner to say because they have no power to enforce it, and they didn't actually say it so they're not on the hook. It's practically a cheesy pickup line, and given the context, it kinda is.

On your first point: It doesn't read like that to me. It seems like they built one of their key products (Claude Code) on top of Bun, and want to have a say in it's development.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#902

Post by simgt »

We're meant to all be 100x more productive with Claude Code but

- Anthropic can't write its TUI app in anything else more suitable than Javascript

- They feel the need to buy a portion of their software supply chain

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#903

Post by wrathofmonads »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #834
mythz wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI tools value simplicity, fast bootstrapping and iterations, this rules out the JVM which has the worst build system and package repositories I've ever had the displeasure of needing to use. Check in gradle binaries in 2025? Having to wait days for packages to sync? Windows/Linux gradle wrappers for every project? Broken builds and churn after every major upgrade. It's broken beyond repair. By contrast `bun install`…

Apples and oranges. Maven is leagues beyond npm. Screw Gradle. How many mass security incidents have there been with npm just the last few weeks?

Maven is excellent! Once you understand it, you can work with almost any Maven project without needing to learn the specifics. I’d take Maven or Cargo any day over anything in the JavaScript or Python ecosystem.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#904

Post by speed_spread »

JavierFlores09 wrote: post #816
speed_spread wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By using Gradle you certainly didn't make yourself a favor.

I am unsure why people feel the need to say this about Gradle. If you aren't doing anything fancy, the most you will touch is the repositories and dependencies block of your build script, perhaps add publishing or shadow plugins and configure them accordingly but that has never been simpler than it is now. Gradle breaks when you feel the need to unnecessarily update things like the wrapper version or plugins without…

So now there will be Kotlin DSL, Groovy DSL and declarative DSL, spread out over up to five files in the project root. Gradle is like C++, trying to climb out of it's complexity hole by digging deeper every new version.

The problem with Gradle is that it never had a clear philosophy to begin with. It's trying to be everything to everybody, changes best practices every year and has enough features that the project at hand could entirely be built out of Gradle scripts itself.

And oh, it still requires an update to run everytime a new JDK is released even though the SDK is the most backward compatible thing ever written.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#905

Post by pier25 »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #630
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?

> Will this make it more or less likely for people to use Bun vs Deno? I'm not sure it will make much of a difference in the short term. For those who were drawn to Bun by hype and/or some concerns around speed, they will continue to use Bun. For me personally, I will continue to use Node for legacy projects and will continue using Deno for current projects. I'm not interested in Bun for it's hype (since hype is flee…

> Deno fixes both of those problems with a proper permission model and a standard library

Bun has a better standard library than Deno. You get a DB driver, S3 client, etc which on Deno are all third party deps. It was the main reason I got interested in Bun. The speed is nice though during dev. Everything feels instant.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#906

Post by someguyiguess »

This explains why Claude started transpiling & running JavaScript code! Yesterday, when I asked it to generate a document for me in JavaScript, it generated the JavaScript and then ran it to generate a document. I had never actually seen it compile and run any code before. It only would ever output code and either use the shell (Claude code) to run it on my local computer or allow me to copy and paste it.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#907

Post by PurpleRamen »

moritonal wrote: post #861
notnullorvoid wrote: post #708

I am more shocked about the origin story compared to the acquisition. > Almost five years ago, I was building a Minecraft-y voxel game in the browser. The codebase got kind of large, and the iteration cycle time took 45 seconds to test if changes worked. Most of that time was spent waiting for the Next.js dev server to hot reload. Why in the hell would anyone be using Next.js to make a 3D game... Jarred has always se…

This take is interesting given we're all here congratulating Jarred for seeing that there was no tool to solve x so made it, and is now enjoying a likely nice payday. Be the change you want to see in the world?

It kinda reads like a case of survivorship bias. He is the one in a million to reach the good ending, despite starting with the wrong choice; though in this case, the wrong choice brought him on the road to the good ending.

Now the real question is, does the game loads significant better now, or does the performance still suck? In which case it might be more an excessive case of yak-shaving. And if yes, when can we except the release?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#908

Post by someguyiguess »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #409
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…

> 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…

Good thing they got acquired by a company that also has a snowballs chance in hell of ever paying back their investment

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#909

Post by someguyiguess »

brabel wrote: post #812
n2d4 wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't edit my comment anymore but Bun posted a pretty detailed explanation of their motivation here: https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic Sounds like "monetizing Bun is a distraction, so we're letting a deep-pocketed buyer finance Bun moving forward".

Isn’t Anthropic itself also burning investors money? I thought no AI company is making any profit.

This is correct

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#910

Post by someguyiguess »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #755
papichulo2023 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is still a new company and so far they seem "friendly". That being said, I still feel this can go either way.

Yep. Remember when "Open"AI took a bunch of grant money and then turned for-profit? And kept their fraudulent name.

That’s kind of why Anthropic became a separate company in the first place though isn’t it? Dario Amodei was former head of research at OpenAI and left along with 6 or 7 others to form Anthropic.
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