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0 pointsJarred5d ago0 comments

I work on Bun, and this post is confusing to me. Me personally and the Bun team continues to dogfood & make Bun better everyday. Our development pace has only gotten faster. Bun's stability has improved significantly since joining Anthropic.

Here are some things shipping in the next version of Bun:

- 17 MB smaller Windows x64 binaries [0]

- 8 MB smaller Linux binaries [1]

- `--no-orphans` CLI flag to recursively kill any lingering processes spawned [3]

- SSL context caching for client TCP & unix sockets, which significantly reduces memory usage for database clients like Mongoose/MongoDB [4]

- Experimental HTTP/3 & HTTP/2 client in fetch [5]

- Experimental HTTP/3 support in Bun.serve() [6]

- Bun.Image, a builtin image processing library [7]

(Along with several reliability improvements to node:fs, Worker, BroadcastChannel, and MessagePort)

The Anthropic acquisition also means Bun no longer needs to become a revenue-generating business. We are very incentivized to make Bun better because Claude Code depends on it, and so many software engineers depend on Claude Code to help get their work done.

[0]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30219

[1]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30098

[2]: https://github.com/oven-sh/WebKit/pull/211

[3]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29930

[4]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29932

[5]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29863

[6]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30032

0 comments

zarzavat5d ago

Acquisitions in this industry tend to lead to a certain inevitable conclusion. The software that has been acquired gets worse as the original team members cash out and their culture is replaced with the culture of the new owner.

Perhaps Bun will be the exception, but you can't say that the concern is unfounded.

The CEO of Anthropic has a habit of making outlandish predictions about how AI is so very close to replacing human programmers. Anthropic has been applying this belief to Claude Code and it has become a giant heap of unmaintainable spaghetti.

loosescrews5d ago

Hasn't your team shrunk a lot? Word on the street is that many of Bun's employees left or let go in the time leading up to the acquisition. How many people are left working on Bun?

Has development velocity increased because you are merging large quantities of unreviewed LLM generated code? If so, I would be very worried about future stability if I used Bun.

sebmellen5d ago

Saying that you “work on Bun” is such a radical understatement. I have my reservations about Anthropic, but I don’t see how Bun could go wrong with you at the helm. And I’m sure that you are putting the stability and funding of a larger organization to good use :)

I’ve been a Bun maximalist since the beginning. Thank you Jarred!!!

tkel5d ago

Perhaps it could go wrong because he uses AI robots to generate responses to issues on claude code that are also generated by AI robots? Just bots talking to each other like moltbook. It shows a level of AI maximalism that is absurd, concerning, and funny. But probably par for the course for someone working at Anthropic. I can imagine being surrounded by people doing similarly foolish things only encourages the foolery.

allthetime5d ago

It's a little heartbreaking. The DX of Bun is legitimately amazing and perhaps even revolutionary (I say this as a long-time javascript backender). I'm all for LLM-based development velocity enhancement, but it does really feel like they are taking it too far and moving too fast.

y1n05d ago

I don't really see the issue here. They are language models after-all and they work by talking. Whether it's one model talking to itself (i.e thinking/reasoning), or one model talking to another it amounts to the same thing.

nsagent5d ago

I think velocity is a real risk to stability, dogfooding or not. That's what made me swear off the python transformers library. It's doubtful that LLMs will change that calculus for the better.

attractivechaos5d ago

The best feature Bun delivered recently is portable binary. That portability is a huge deal to me as my users are often on ancient Linux distros. Thank you. Both node and deno require recent Linux, more exactly, recent glibc.

allthetime5d ago

Hey Jarred, first of all, thanks. I've been doing backend JS since the first release of node and bun is genuinely the first really big improvement in terms of DX. It's an absolute delight to build glue and scripts with... Bun.* just seems to have everything I need. Bun.$ is revolutionary. etc. etc. I'm hoping to run a collection of backend services on it in the near future but it seems the general consensus is that there are still some gremlins holding it back (memory leaks, etc.)

Can you shed a little light on the recent giant rust based commits though? Are you guys moving away from zig? These kind of big curious movements and the spectre of giant LLM-based commits are not exactly confidence inspiring.

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0 comments

zarzavat5d ago

Perhaps Bun will be the exception, but you can't say that the concern is unfounded.

loosescrews5d ago

Hasn't your team shrunk a lot? Word on the street is that many of Bun's employees left or let go in the time leading up to the acquisition. How many people are left working on Bun?

Has development velocity increased because you are merging large quantities of unreviewed LLM generated code? If so, I would be very worried about future stability if I used Bun.

sebmellen5d ago

I’ve been a Bun maximalist since the beginning. Thank you Jarred!!!

tkel5d ago

allthetime5d ago

y1n05d ago

nsagent5d ago

I think velocity is a real risk to stability, dogfooding or not. That's what made me swear off the python transformers library. It's doubtful that LLMs will change that calculus for the better.

attractivechaos5d ago

allthetime5d ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse