Anthropic acquires Bun • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#951

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:37 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #558

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…

Why do Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI, AWS and other so-called "tech" companies advertise on TV

What about people who do not own a TV

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#952

Post by theodric » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

That's nothing. I just bought four buns yesterday!

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#953

Post by gaws » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

Are contributors getting cash or Anthropic equity as part of the acquisition?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#954

Post by gaws » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

PetrBrzyBrzek wrote: post #445

simonw wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Anthropic need Bun to be healthy because they use it for Claude Code.

I think it’s an acquihire, and they also like Bun.

It's not an acqui-hire. Anthropic is keeping Bun.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#955

Post by gaws » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

Sincere6066 wrote: post #720

Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

how can you sleep at night?

The money was too good to pass up.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#956

Post by gaws » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

danirogerc wrote: post #922

Hopefully it doesn't push other LLM companies to go the same route.

It absolutely will.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#957

Post by logsr » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:27 PM UTC

creata wrote: post #407

logsr wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vibe-coded projects get bought by vibe-coded companies this is so far from the truth. Bun, Zig, and uWebsockets are passion projects run by individuals with deep systems programming expertise. furthest thing from vibe coding imaginable. > a decade of performance competition in the JS VM space this was a rising tide that lifted all boats, including Node, but Node is built with much more of the system implemented in…

> Node is built with much more of the system implemented in JS, so it is architecturally incapable of the kind of performance Bun/uWebsockets achieves That sounds like an implementation difference, not an architectural difference. If they wanted to, what would prevent Node or a third party from implementing parts of the stdlib in a faster language?

uWebsockets, which is the foundation of the network and http server stack in Bun, as I understand it, is a compatible 3rd party extension to Node.js that gives it similar performance on HTTP implementation.

The key architectural difference is that Node.js implements the HTTP stack and other low level libraries in JavaScript, which gives it memory safety guarantees provided by the v8 runtime, while Bun/uWebsockets are a zig/C++ implementation. for Node.js, which is focused on enterprise adoption, the lower performance JS approach better aligns with the security profile of their enterprise adoption target.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#958

Post by catigula » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

danenania wrote: post #942

catigula wrote: post #930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the whole 'cloud' thing for AI agents. It feels forced. Who is actually using these services?

Non-developers usually prefer them to IDE or terminal based tools.

Non-developers shouldn't be trying to maintain code. Developing products as if they can is very disingenuous.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#959

Post by sgt » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

valbaca wrote: post #193

> If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent. and when this bubble pops down goes bun

Not really, we can just fork it?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#960

Post by tibbar » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:06 PM UTC

krig wrote: post #181

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. This is just completely insane. We went through more than a decade of performance competition in the JS VM space, and the _only_ justification that Google had for creating V8 was performance. > The V8 engine was first introduced by Google in 2008, coinciding with the launch of the Google Chrome web browser. At the time, web applications were becoming increasingly…

This missed the mark - Bun optimized systems whose predecessors were often implemented as JS libraries with a high number of syscalls. V8 is super fast for web usecases but your typical webpack / react compiler as implemented in JS had tons of unnecessary bottlenecks.