Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good?

tipiirai

I've been a heavy user of Bun since 2022. The last three months of their public timeline have not looked good, so I wanted to summarize my frustration

rao-v

What is the right recommendation at this point for a Node alternative? Deno?

dvt

> The last three months have not looked good for Bun. Apart from pro-AI or anti-AI posturing how have the last few months not looked good for Bun, exactly? I use it daily and I've seen basically zero regressions. I get it, you don't like AI or you like Zig over Rust, or whatever. I just haven't seen any serious argument that Bun has somehow become worse software. > The project has over 5k open pull requests, which is the largest number of pull requests I’ve seen. Terrible argument, and not really an argument at all. > The biggest worry is, of course, the code itself. I agree, so look at the code and point out what's wrong with it. Insofar as Andrew Kelley is concerned, it's obvious he has an axe to grind and is salty about Bun embarassing Zig (which he freely admits). Not sure why you'd invoke an unreliable narrator as some sort of final nail in the coffin.

aneryu

Based on my experience so far, code written by today’s frontier LLM is generally trustworthy, though it still requires human oversight.

joshuat

This reads as another weirdly personal attack against Jarred for slighting a technology stack the author prefers, citing the even weirder personal attack against Jarred written by Andrew Kelley as the sole source to justify their "biggest worry", code quality. Idk why people have become so invested in this.

jemiluv8

Yet another clickbait making outrageous assertions. Fwiw I don’t think anyone’s reputation is on the line and so far, you’ve offered only anecdotal evidence at best. Things like this should be backed by stats and community surveys and a whole lot more. I didn’t see anything about number of downloads or any of the usual metrics used to judge software these days Your whole scientific endeavor in this seemed to thrive on the rock solid foundation of tweets. And all those referencing of the Kelly post makes this even more of a clickbait. All you had was to put all the ingredients of a post that will draw the crowd but offer very little on the subject matter it purported to discuss

okeuro49

Counterpoint: > Our conclusion is deliberately modest: under the conditions Prisma Compute cares about, the Rust rewrite behaved better than the stable release we had been testing. That was enough to change what we shipped. https://www.prisma.io/blog/bun-rust-rewrite-prisma-compute

franciscop

Bun has been nothing but amazing wins for me, and I really like what it enabled me to do. Two examples: - I have a couple of projects that handle images. I was including Sharp, but since these are side projects in a small VM, often a redeploy that recompiled Sharp just crashed the full VM (out of memory). Bun includes Bun.Image[1] natively, which is built around Sharp's API, so swapping Sharp out was very easy, and now deploys are a breeze (and swapping it in would be just as easy). - Bun's JSX support is a godsend. I've replaced almost all my side projects that were backend rendered from Pug, Handlebars, and other various templates I used to have to just pure JSX. Heck, this made it trivial to make a side projects where the Favicon was a dynamic SVG [2] [1] https://bun.com/docs/runtime/image [2] https://stocksreader.com/portfolio?%5Egspc=10&amzn=10&msft=1...

skeledrew

I'm still waiting for someone to bring forth some reproducible stats and state something along the lines of "I did a comparison of Bun 1.3 vs 1.4, and found these user-affecting issues in the latter which are not in the former".

jtrn

This reads like one of thouse articles in mainstream media where the author has a obvious agenda, and they think they are really clever when they write an attack piece that they think looks like objective , when it really really transparently isent.

tonyhart7

lmao need 5 trillion more Opus token

rich_sasha

For me the real test will be maintainability going forwards. Not a JS user. I suppose it’s one thing to rewrite code and make tests pass. But a lot of my own CPU cycles when coding go to making the code understandable, modular, editable etc. IME Claude is not great on these. Maybe it doesn’t matter? Maybe the spaghetti makes sense to Claude, and when you say “hey add this feature”, no problem? But maybe it will turn into a worse ball of spaghetti, with no nicely curated tests, hacks on hacks on hacks and never ending loops of whackamole of “just change this one line and rerun tests”. I can imagine both - let’s see.

0-bad-sectors

I think this is a great chance for us to evaluate how capable AI is and at what cost does it deliver such capabilities. I would love to know how much token they spent on the rewrite starting from deciding to rewrite till they actually ship. I assume since the beginning of this whole rewrite saga they have been spending tokens on it every day so the number that Jarred mentioned in his blog post has increased a lot since then. Also assuming the future releases will be done through AI as well I wonder how much it will cost for each of them.

classicposter

https://x.com/yagiznizipli/status/2082905235459117202 They were pleased to be faster than Go in the "Hello World" benchmark, but unfortunately, they lag behind Node.js and Deno in complex real-world workloads.

SaucyWrong

This remains one of the strangest and frankly most annoying beefs I’ve ever read about all decade, and I say this as somebody with no particular affinity for bun, rust, or zig.

Havoc

Could have sworn I read this exact article a month ago

rtpg

3 months since the last stable release feels ... alright. The constant promises for a new stable release feels a bit like a self-own. Having said that I would have a bit more confidence in things if release just got back to a normal pace.

AntonOfTheWoods

Lots of people are apparently happily using the canary version in prod. Anthropic has been using it for ages now, as has Prisma. Why not release 1.4 (or 2.0 or whatever) then? It won't get picked up by lots of tooling and won't get allowed in many "no pre-release in prod" shops until then. It had plenty of issues before (many thousands of open issues) so a few thousand more is hardly a big deal...

conartist6

I think the rewrite will end up being more expensive (for the same quality) because AI was used. At the same time this specific rewrite is being used to drive the narrative that reading the code is counterproductive. If they had delivered their promises, they might have convincingly delivered that argument. ...but the cost keeps going up and up and up and up! If it was only the token costs it might still be economically viable, but I'm imagining that when you add in the pro-rated salaries of the human engineers this would start to look like a financial blunder even if it released today. It's true that I don't want a success story told about a failure, because then replicating the "success" would likely produce lots more bad outcomes