They fork Zig to utilize LLM rewrites and build something the Zig team clearly disregarded (non-deterministic compiling)
And now like a whiny baby they LLM rewrite to Rust. There is a very real chance that Zig design philosophy got them to the point where they are now by enforcing to make the tough but precise decisions and the Rust rewrite is the start of the downfall.
It’s purely politics-based not technical, but it seems like bun is full on pampered by Claude. So much that I wouldn’t wonder that the next marketing piece of Anthropic is. Claude Mythos rewrote leading 950k LOC JS Runtime to Rust.
It's not a "your holding it wrong" problem it's a you fundamentally have no idea how your own program works past 1 or 2 level of indentation in most places. If the LLM says that something isn't possible you just have to take it at it's word.
I didn't see any whining from Jarred, this seems like misplaced sentiment
> It’s purely politics-based
The linked twitter thread gives clear technical justifications
There are legit reasons to rewrite a program in a better fitting language, but as a runtime to be "tired of worrying about & spending lots of time fixing memory leaks and crashes and stability" is really borderline to me.
Also there are way more things to it than just compile time and tests: you reset mental model and will lose contributers. There is philosophy, developer skill and more attached to a language.
In this case both compile via LLVM the same and there is no performance benefit given the code is written exactly the same, so it’s developer preference, where the current head seemed to prioritize his own DX over everyone else’s.
But again this is mainly my gut feeling. I’m not the first dev that doesn’t like the way bun changes : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011184
https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic
I'm not sure if the 50% of people defending the whole rewrite live under a rock with regard to the acquisition or have never worked at a US company or a deliberately naive. Companies give instructions. Nothing of this is accidental or prompted by curiosity.
Jarred mentioned having to work on fixing memory leaks as the main motivation to try this.
https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2053058171338682875#...
I was never fully comfortable with Zig given it's much less mature than Rust. Maybe this will be for the better.
Much of working in the JS / NPM ecosystem is already pure faith on un-vetted dependencies, and this appears no different pre or post LLM rewrite. If it satisfies the intended goal and API contract it originally did, is there any difference? Were you carefully reading the original source code before?
You don't?
If I go beyond the initial vetting, that's a minimum of 30+ projects multiplied by however many contributors each. Without even mentioning all of their sub dependencies. It's a pipe dream to think you can ever have a complete picture of the motivations and political machinations of your entire dependency tree.
The risks of using bun are no longer just those concerns around a newer tech and "drop-in" replacement for nodejs. Now you have to marry Anthropic, Rust, and a founder with conflicting priorities.
Anthropic bought it in a somewhat dumb attempt to solve their "performance" issues (not realizing their horrible code was the issue in the first place).
It probably helped them, simply because they brought in some actually competent developers.
But doing so, Bun went from being a public project to more of an internal tool for Anthropic, spoiled for now with AI money and losing quite a bit of focus.
Let's hope that when the bubble pops, some of the Bun effort could at least be salvaged. I don't see Anthropic maintaining it long term, they are simply not in the business of selling support for a runtime nor have the (Google) scale justifying maintaining one on the side.
