My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

asciimoo

I was wrong to be upset this whole time that the rewrite would hurt Zig. This is one of those rare occasions when I’m glad I was wrong. Interesting insights.

jdw64

I read the post and roughly summarized it as: 1.It felt uncomfortable that Bun was presented as a representative example of Zig. From the internal Zig perspective, it looked more like a bad example of how to use Zig. 2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide. 3.I(OP,andrewkelly) don't think badly of Jarred as a person, but after signing a contract with VC, the management side has been poor. 4.The Bun documentation looked like marketing. 5.Bad contributions driven by AI came through indirect promotion of Bun, which attracted interest from people after it was acquired by Antropic. I understand that it's burdensome to see Bun as Zig's representative success story, and I get the wish not to see Rust rewrites through a lens of language superiority. But on the flip side, I'm not sure I would have ever learned about Zig if not for Bun. While the criticism is valid, I also understand Bun's position. After all, Antropic's acquisition of Bun was ultimately about showing that even a 'new language' can be used effectively with AI, and that's precisely where the friction arose. I think the refusal to accept AI from a purely human programmer perspective is a matter of personal values, and I find the Zig team admirable on a human level. (Though I'm an active proponent of AI, so my view differs.) Both sides have valid points, but sometimes I wish someone would turn the emotional and political dynamics of open source into a novel. I think it would be fascinating

Tiberium

It feels like the first half of blog post is less of "thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite" and more "I don't like Jarred, he's a bad programmer and manager". Maybe I'm wrong, but it strongly feels this way. I'm not saying that Andrew is right or wrong, it's just that you could throw out most of the first half of the post and not lose anything actually on topic. > But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset, and he took venture capital. > Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective. > Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs

nilirl

> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred The whole post felt like a personal criticism of Jarred.

Jyaif

> he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards. That sounds completely surreal. Is Bun really used that much?

SuperV1234

> The main problem, however, was code quality. > The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. Perhaps the amount of bugs comes from using a C-like language that requires meticulous manual care to avoid writing runtime bugs. Even C++ would be a safer choice because of RAII. When you have to dedicate significant resources to avoid/fix runtime issues that are made impossible at compile time by other languages, the programmer isn't entirely at fault.

feverzsj

It's more like a transpile, far from idiomatic rust.

cyber1

To me, this whole effort of rewriting Bun from Zig to Rust looks like a big marketing move. The question is: if Anthropic AI is really that powerful, why not just fix the bugs and give it the more ambitious task of redesigning the existing Bun Zig codebase in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future?

vincent-uden

I for one appreciate a public figure with a wildly opposed mindset to the Silicon Valley/VC-Funded/Ultrascaling/whatever crowd. The pushback is warranted and on point, especially the technical points. It has taken a suspicious amount of time to produce the fabled blog post which I don't think states almost any new information beyond what Jarred has already shared on twitter. The one (and very interesting) exception is the theoretical price of the rewrite via the API pricing.

orangeisthe

So bun went from bad Zig code to absolute slop Rust code?

whimsicalism

Anyone who would write an article like this is much more distasteful to me than anything Jarred did.

themgt

Zig is getting that Elm, etc vibe. Genius/visionary BFDL who's also personally incapable of leading the project towards healthy long-term viability. Say what you will about Matz or José Valim, I don't think they'd ever write a "and don't let the door hit you on the way out" screed full of personal attacks ("stinky manager", "writing slop", "a total shit show") against a person who led a very prominent project and financially supported the language.

bpavuk

well, for me personally, "the" Zig project is not Bun but Ghostty, and it always has been. yeah, Mitchell is very pro-AI, but he is thoughtful, and he sometimes highlights the difference between Zig's and Ghostty's approaches to LLMs (outright ban vs taming)

embedding-shape

> So, when the Anthropic aquisition finally happened, we at ZSF breathed a sigh of relief. When the donation silently stopped, our bank account was ready for it. When they neither canceled their monthly meeting with us, nor showed up, we were not surprised. The relationship was over. Seen this time and time again, project/organization gets taken over, and everything "good" they did doesn't get exited with fanfare or anything, just silently dropped as your benefactor starts silently ignoring you. I'm really happy they saw the writing on the all and were prepared for the inevitable, a really great lesson you shouldn't need to learn yourself the hard way, and FOSS project relying on one/two big donators should take heed, we'll see a lot more of this in the developer tooling ecosystem moving forward for sure.

tomlockwood

Is the bun rewrite actually done? There's no tag for the release, and as it stands robobun has almost 1.3k open PRs on the repo: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls/robobun It doesn't look done. And it looks like work on the rewrite began in early may: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/46d3bc29f270fa881dd573... So... its more like a 2 month rewrite that is definitely not done yet????

hazn

Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack. Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance: 1) It's hardcore Anti-AI 2) It's moved to Codeberg 3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselves that Zig is a success, despite the industry having moved on.

sarreph

It's hard, in my opinion, to lend credence to the author here when they decided to devote the first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem. Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig! I've been keen to pick Zig up recently due to mitchellh's evangelism and inspiring writing on the subject. This article puts me off learning Zig.

simianwords

I notice something more interesting. This post shows Andrew to not only personally criticise Ben but also clearly shows an ideological stance against AI. I can see it from multiple angles - refusing AI PR's, refusing Anthropic's donation and multiple other things. Either this ideology helps Zig position itself as a hand crafted language. Or this ideology is self defeating.

0xpgm

I'm glad LLM coding exists for people who want to move at an insane superhuman speed (perhaps they're trying to achieve escape velocity and launch into the stars or something) so that they don't grind down their fellow humans. You can either do local optimization - a single individual moving as fast and as hard as humanly possible, or global optimization - a team working together and amplifying each other's efforts to produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

dzonga

articles like these are needed - if you've to call people out - do it. the tech industry's fake politeness has caused pain and confusion. & yeah - I had already stayed off Bun before the whole rewrite, but now more reasons.