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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#971

Post by baby »

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…

if I would guess Anthropic is (rightly) frustrated with the state of the js ecosystem and is taking the best attempt so far to make the js experience much more streamlined for their developers. Convention over configuration might finally be coming to the js ecosystem?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#972

Post by baby »

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.

I really don't understand why investors poured so much money into Bun, I guess they saw another potential Vercel play? An acquisition doesn't sound like a very good outcome for these investors, even by Anthropic, I would imagine

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#973

Post by baby »

Jarred wrote: post #361

I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions

I love Bun and use it daily, but I'm still very frustrated by all the configuration that one needs ATM when working in the js ecosystem. Do you guys see yourself integrating more and more, and moving more and more towards a "convention over configuration", to bring a more streamlined dev experience (that languages like Golang and Rust have, for example)

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#974

Post by eps »

losvedir wrote: post #969
eps wrote: post #881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the GP was referring to https://handmade.network as their manifesto made multiple rounds here, was discussed at length and far more obviously related to "handmade movement" remark than your org.

Yes, I was referring to Handmade Network, but check out who you're responding to[0]. Honestly, I wasn't too sure about the Handmade Cities thing, but I recognized his name as someone thick in the middle of my question, so I assumed it was a rebranding or something since I don't follow so closely. [0] https://handmade.network/m/abnercoimbre

Yeah, I looked the GP up too, because I never heard of this Cities thing.

I took your comment as referring to people who like to manually unroll their loops rather than members of some particular community, so GP's nitpicking on specifics of that interpretation looked out of place.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#975

Post by NewsaHackO »

altmanaltman wrote: post #790
NewsaHackO wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but they are a company that burns billions every year in losses No they don't.

> As discussed previously, OpenAI lost $5 billion and Anthropic $5.3 billion in 2024, with OpenAI expecting to lose upwards of $8 billion and Anthropic — somehow — only losing $3 billion in 2025. I have severe doubts that these numbers are realistic, with OpenAI burning at least $3 billion in cash on salaries this year alone, and Anthropic somehow burning two billion dollars less on revenue that has, if you believe i…

You may have posted the wrong link, because what you posted was not a source, but rather an amatuer blogger's oponion about what anthrotic's and OpenAI revenue and losses are. Do you have the correct link to actual evidence that Anthropic has losses in the billions?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#976

Post by soapdog »

ignoramous wrote: post #968
esjeon wrote: post #931

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I really get that. I’ve been a fan of zig and bun since their inception, but, AI corp deep in the dev chain? I feel uncomfortable, because no one knows when they’ll start steering things into weird directions.

> AI corp deep in the dev chain? I feel uncomfortable ... tbf, Google has long been an AI corp. The Big Labs are trying to get in to other products/businesses just like Google did.

Not comfy with them either

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#977

Post by spartanatreyu »

pier25 wrote: post #905
spartanatreyu wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Bun has a better standard library than Deno. You get a DB driver, S3 client, etc which on Deno are all third party deps.

Aren't you hosting Bun on a 3rd party host though?

Wouldn't you want to use the 3rd party's own dependency to connect to the 3rd party's services?

---

I wasn't sure how bun handled it's db driver so I just checked the docs. Looks like they try to have a single api for multiple databases by writing queries in template strings.

I can see the appeal of a single api, but using template strings looks like a bad way to do it.

What happens when someone adds a keyword or function into a query that exists in one database engine but not another? Or even in one version of a database but not another? Or even in the same database engine and same version but with different settings?

It's a terrible debugging experience trying to resolve those kinds of issues when you're depending on a database that someone else has set up.

You need a different driver for each database engine, or you can have a unified api if you use an ORM since it can translate or shim your query into the SQL supported by your database engine.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#978

Post by supern0va »

littlestymaar wrote: post #447
supern0va wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Presumably Jarred got a nice enough payout that if Anthropic failed, he would not need to work. At that point, he's more than welcome to take the fully MIT licensed Bun and fork it to start another company or just continue to work on it himself if he so chooses.

> At that point, he's more than welcome to take the fully MIT licensed Bun and fork it to start another company or just continue to work on it himself if he so chooses. Is there any historical precedent of someone doing that?

I think by the time these things tend to happen, projects have outgrown their singular founder and usually have a large developer community (because issues usually take a long time to bubble up after an acquisition). So, it's hard to find a specific case of the founder driving the fork.

Monty forking MySQL after the Oracle acquisition is the only real example that comes to mind. Oracle being Oracle resulted in OpenOffice getting forked, too, but that was mostly driven by Canonical.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#979

Post by danenania »

catigula wrote: post #958
danenania wrote: post #942

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, how dare they break the law like that!

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#980

Post by miguelspizza »

locknitpicker wrote: post #800
miguelspizza wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where you heard this but general sentiment is the opposite. There was recently a conference which was themed around the idea that typescript monorepos are the best way to build with AI

> Not sure where you heard this but general sentiment is the opposite. My personal experience and anecdotal evidence is in line with this hypothesis. Using the likes of Microsoft's own Copilot with small simple greenfield TypeScript 5 projects results in surprisingly poor results the minute you start leaning heavily on type safety and idiomatic techniques such as branded types. > There was recently a conference which…

Hate to say it but this sounds like a skill issue. The reason Typescript monorepos are gaining popularity for building with AI is because of how powerful TS's inference system is. If you are writing lots of types you are doing it wrong.

You declare your schema with a good TS ORM then use something like TRPC to get type inference from your schemas in your route handlers and your front end.

You get an enforced single source of truth that keeps the AI on track with a very small amount of code compared to something like Java.

This really only applies to full stack SAAS apps though.

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