Rewriting Bun in Rust

by afturner • 14 days ago

795 521 14 days ago

minimaxir3• 14 days ago

Adding bespoke animations via Claude Code to the blog post is definitely thematic. It's unclear if they're useful data visualizations as they take a bit of time to parse, but they're neat.

thevinter• 14 days ago

One thing that I found interesting is that most of the discourse surrounding the topic happened with the assumption that the rewrite was happening with an Opus-like model, and not with Fable. Those assumptions, at least partially, were used as arguments against the fact that the rewrite was feasible and/or a good idea.

Clearly the model itself doesn't completely change the narrative, but at least as a note to myself, I would like to be more careful with assuming the capabilities of the models used internally by Anthropic and affiliated orgs.

cube002• 14 days ago

the assumption that the rewrite was happening with an Opus-like model, and not with Fable

I thought the same thing. Looking back, I was probably mislead in May when Jarred was explaining the pattern to "Rewrite every .zig file to .rs" as if it was something I could have done in May following his pattern. What he wasn't telling us was he was using pre-release Fable. [1]

A possible signal for next time is when we see an Anthropic owned company disabling the Claude Co-Authored-By trailer. [2] In an IPO year they have to take every chance to promote Claude unless it was something (Fable) that we weren't supposed to know about back in May.

[1] https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2060050586024743376#...

[2] https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/23427dbc12fdcff30c23a9...

guardiang• 14 days ago

Silly assumption, Mythos was available at the time. Benefit of the doubt should've gone to Jarred.

rvz2• 14 days ago

As expected [0] [1], this was a clear advertisement / marketing opportunity of Anthropic's Fable model on rewriting Bun (which powers Claude Code) from Zig into Rust.

Something that would have taken hundreds of developers now took 1 developer with Fable.

Now Claude, rewrite Claude Code from TypeScript to Rust. Make absolutely zero mistakes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073893

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48240829

steveklabnik9• 14 days ago

EDIT: the parent has effectively deleted their original comment

There are a lot of ways to do a terrible job of this. For example, prompting Claude "Rewrite Bun in Rust. Don't make any mistakes." and then praying it would work is not what I did.

rvz2• 14 days ago

EDIT: the parent has effectively deleted their original comment

Not really and we both know that is not true.

The last line of the comment was the joke. [0] It is clear that you didn't get it and many others did. That is OK.

Heavens forbid anyone here is allowed to make any jokes on this site.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48839063

merb• 14 days ago

1 Developer with a 200k budget for tools.

Philpax3• 14 days ago

Without commenting on Bun itself as a project, or the nature of the rewrite, it can't be good for Zig that a naive rewrite away from it fixed memory leaks, improved stability, shrunk binary size by 20%, and improved performance by 5%.

bielok• 14 days ago

I would guess that people looking to use Zig understand that those are project concerns and not language concerns.

Zakis12• 14 days ago

The stability gains are a direct language concern as mentioned throughout the article.

egorfine11• 14 days ago

Judging from comments on this article: no.

pyrolistical• 14 days ago

Yeah but they turned it into something unreadable. Call it a skill issue if you wish.

I just haven’t found another language that just makes sense. Zig doesn’t hide anything from you

lifthrasiir6• 14 days ago

The article explicitly mentions the maintainability as a foremost concern.

kgeist2• 14 days ago

they turned it into something unreadable

Did you compare the code before/after? It's a mechanical line-by-line port, and most of the code is identical to the old version, just with Rust syntax. They have an example in the blog post.

baby• 14 days ago

I find Rust more readable than zig

throwaway27448• 14 days ago

True, but rewrites often allow for this sort of benefit in themselves. It's possible rewriting it in zig would have yielded some of the same improvements.

pdpi• 14 days ago

A sophisticated rewrite? Sure. This was a naive like-for-like rewrite, though.

rq12• 14 days ago

From a PL Theory perspective, Zig is vibe-coded.

Not sure why people use it.

whytevuhuni4• 14 days ago

Pretty much everything except Haskell and the like can be considered as such.

That's because closely following PL theory isn't always the right goal for a language. Ergonomics and pragmatism are far more important.

lifthrasiir6• 14 days ago

The same concern applies to every GC language, so it's not necessarily bad for Zig. Bun can have been grown too large for Zig to be effective, while moderately sized projects may still greatly benefit from Zig.

saghm2• 14 days ago

I thought Zig was supposed to be a C replacement (as in, it doesn't actually provide full safety in the way that Rust or a GC language would)?

geon• 14 days ago

Wouldn't the same improvements have been made in zig if they instructed the agents to improve instead of rewrite?

Zakis12• 14 days ago

But how would you verify that the agents have written memory safe code? Rust's borrowchecker is a lot faster and actually verifiably safe compared to asking an LLM to fix the safety issues that the Zig version had.

gpm5• 14 days ago

Maybe they'd get the same numeric improvements and bug fixes today (or maybe not, or maybe they'd get even more since the LLM isn't spending time rewriting correct code).

But they wouldn't get a change to the structural issues that created the issues in the first place. They'd end up "ke[eping] fixing these kinds of bugs one-off in perpetuity".

egorfine11• 14 days ago

Unfortunately (and I say this because I hate this whole rust rewrite) no. There is no fixing a third-party garbage collector on top of the non-memory-managed language. Jarred explains in a post what would that Zig look like.

frollogaston4• 14 days ago

I pay attention when someone makes a hard decision based on a hard-learned lesson. It's like, most who choose to use an ORM just heard of it or want to avoid learning SQL, everyone who removes an ORM learned firsthand horrors.

lionkor5• 14 days ago

The result of this will be that you end up at the highest level of abstraction.

Let me save you time and tell you that C# and it's ecosystem is where you'll be happy.

aizk2• 14 days ago

Funny you mention ORMs, I'm building a project with bun, and just using raw bun sqlite until I feel the app gets too complicated and I need it. AIs are really damn good at SQL, I can just trust them with it, and it keeps the project much lighter. A few years ago this would just sound stupid, but here we are.

simonw5• 14 days ago

I don't think it's care to categorize this as "a naive rewrite away from [Zig]" - Jarred has been immersed in this project for five years, got to benefit from everything he learned along the way and spent $165,000 of tokens on the most advanced coding LLM anyone has access to.

I expect if he'd spent $165,000 running Fable against the Zig version he could have got a 5% performance improvement, too.

Philpax3• 14 days ago

Oh, I have no doubt that they could have extracted those gains from Zig! My point is more that, from a relatively naive line-to-line port, they were able to claim these benefits without much effort.

It's not great for Zig if you have to put in more work to end up at the same place efficiency-wise, especially for a language marketed at people who like to get the most out of their metal.

malisper2• 14 days ago

I can confirm a naive rewrite won't make things faster. I've been working on rewriting Postgres in Rust. I rewrote things function by function similar to how Jarred did. Even though the new Rust code mapped closely with the previous C code, it was 8x slower. This was due to myriad of reasons. For example naively converting a C union into a Rust enum can be slower because Rust stores a tag with the enum, while C unions do not.

I've been working on a new rewrite that's focused on beating Postgres on performance. As of this morning I got to 100% of the tests passing and have meaningful performance gains over Postgres.

einsteinx2• 14 days ago

and spent $165,000 of tokens on the most advanced coding LLM anyone has access to.

After having used 2 full weeks of 20x Max plan tokens on Fable over the weekend (coding all day Saturday and Sunday on a non-trivial project, tasks across full stack, mix of adding features, reviewing code, and fixing bugs), I’m confident if he’d spent $165,000 in Opus tokens the port would have gone more or less just as well (and probably for less than $165,000). Especially so with the system they set up with all the custom workflows, adversarial reviews, extensive test coverage, etc.

But I get your point is probably more about Jarred’s experience level and the high cost than the specific model used other than it being SOTA. I’m just being pedantic and feeling a bit disappointed with Fable’s real world performance after all the hype.

I expect if he'd spent $165,000 running Fable against the Zig version he could have got a 5% performance improvement, too.

Totally agree and in fact I’m sure it could be done with significantly less cost even if they stuck with Fable instead of Opus which I’m sure could also do it.

h14h• 14 days ago

While it's easy to look at it that way on the surface, from reading the blog post, it sounds like a big part of it may just be the nature of Bun as a project.

linzhangrun• 14 days ago

zig has been developing too slowly. it still cannot reach a stable 1.0 (to the point that even vsc autocomplete gets its Hello World wrong), and then it ran headfirst into AI.

benced7• 14 days ago

The scary thing is the zig project prohibits LLM contributions - the world is going to move faster than them.

AlotOfReading2• 14 days ago

I would be pissed if my programming language changed as quickly as Claude code does. Languages need to move slowly and carefully, and zig is on the faster end of language development regardless.

ksec3• 14 days ago

I hope Zig won't do a hostile reply to this blog post. But some thoughts on Zig's future where a lot of these problems could be fixed or migrated by better tooling and compiler checking.

But a lot of people have been saying this for sometime, Rust and LLM is a great match. A lot of friction of the language were smoothed out by LLM assisted programming.

netdur• 14 days ago

Zig and Rust solve different problems, Bun got burned by its indiscipline, and Zig’s response was sadly to flood HN with “how to use Zig” articles

zamadatix6• 14 days ago

On the other side of the scale, this codebase started in Zig from 5 years ago while the Zig of today is still very much pre-1.0 - still in the middle of things like finishing up moving to a self hosted compiler. Things like binary size, performance, or some of the oddities around drift in the language (like the custom macros vs now built-in language features) in this rewrite are not really as bad as they'd seem if this was a port from a more complete language.

That said, I think the parts around wanting to properly have memory safety guarantees rather than try hard & patch as issues are found is a more serious concern for Zig as those speak more to the design goals than the current implementation. "better safety than C while maintaining C compatibility" may not be a very compelling reason to chose Zig if other languages are able to do that portion better anyways, even ones without a GC.

NetMageSCW2• 13 days ago

“better safety than Zig while losing compatibility with C” doesn’t seem as compelling a story to me.

xyzsparetimexyz2• 14 days ago

No, you don't get it. Zig is a language about having _fun_. Not memory safety and all that crap. That's why unused variables are hardcoded as errors!

randusername• 14 days ago

I hope this isn't the takeaway!

Zig was the right tool to start, Rust is the right tool to finish.

Making something possible and refining something until it is high security and reliability are different problems. Zig is great, but for a JS runtime, I just don't think that's the best long-term fit.

bel8• 14 days ago

Claude Code v2.1.181 (released June 17th) and later use the Rust port of Bun.

It seems the reports of Bun's death have been greatly exaggerated.

classicposter• 14 days ago

This slop rewrite introduced new vulnerabilities and regressions.

wilkystyle• 14 days ago

Care to elaborate?

duhhhhh12123• 14 days ago

Where is the cost breakdown? I feel like this would be the easiest number to determine and write in this post. It's hard to believe that there have been no problems/downsides since the port.

gpm5• 14 days ago

Where is the cost breakdown?

From the article

Pre-merge, this took 5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads — around $165,000 at API pricing
It's hard to believe that there have been no problems/downsides since the port.

A significant portion of the article was dedicated to the 19 regressions they've found. Starting here: https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust#porting-mistakes

duhhhhh12123• 14 days ago

Thanks!! Those are solid numbers but confusing. He reported input, output, and cached input token reads but not cache writes/cached creation input tokens? Maybe cache writes aren't a thing internally?

BearOso2• 14 days ago

I posted on an older article that I thought it probably cost half a million in API pricing. 165k USD is a lot lower. I wonder what the actual compute cost was. When this first hit the news, Opus 4.7 was brand new and required 6x the compute power per user token vs 4.6. The article says they were using Fable, which is way more expensive.

dfabulich• 14 days ago

This blog post further undermines my trust in Jarred.

He makes it sound like Claude did a fantastic Rust rewrite, and "the work continues."

But when the Rust port merged to main, the state of the code was very, very bad. There were 13,000 instances of `unsafe`, no Miri tests at all, and, sure enough, it exposed UB in safe Rust. https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/30719

Observers could see this coming from a mile away, objected strongly to using AI to RIIR before the code merged. Rather than incorporate feedback and get the code ready for production, Jarred gaslit us all, right here on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

Just 9 days before he merged the Rust rewrite to the main branch, Jarred wrote:

This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

It's plausible that Bun's Rust rewrite is now in much better shape than it was in May. But a blog post like this would have been a place to apologize, to accept that it was a very bumpy rollout, to acknowledge that public messaging was extremely poor, and to earn back our trust.

As it stands, I guess I'll have to run my own tests to try to evaluate whether Bun 1.4 is ready for prime time, because I just can't trust Jarred to give us a straight answer.

Georgelemental• 14 days ago

Pre-release code had bugs that were fixed before the release? Why is that a problem? That's the point of having a testing and release process

pier258• 14 days ago

what about new bugs introduced after the rewrite?

ubercore2• 14 days ago

It's partly a problem because the narrative is still "rewrote Bun in Rust in 11 days". And they didn't do that, if you consider quality of code. And now people look and see "look what you can do with an LLM in 11 days"

benced7• 14 days ago

We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

God forbid an engineer express uncertainty.

Atotalnoob• 14 days ago

Uncertainty is one thing, but a high chance means it’s 51% or higher to me.

Based on that, the bun rewrite messaging was fairly misleading.

hansvm2• 14 days ago

Engineers are pretty jaded about plans expressed by authority, especially when there are obvious pressures opposing those plans. Yearly planning doesn't matter when a reorg will change the trajectory by Q3. Sprint planning doesn't matter when you know a fire will hit before then and you won't be given enough time budget to fix it well enough for that not to happen again next sprint. Project planning doesn't matter when the whole point is masturbatory spreadsheet production before you've actually taken a dive into the hairier details and figured out what's possible and what's necessary. That barely working demo strapped on top of a non-existent backend they swore would never become production? Congratulations, you have two weeks to build the next fake demo on top of it, but the base has to actually work now.

Maybe Jared just broadcasted uncertainty and was wrong, but given his position he's not being given the normal grace you might extend to an engineer you trust.

simonw5• 14 days ago

But when the Rust port merged to main, the state of the code was very, very bad. There were 13,000 instances of `unsafe`, no Miri tests at all, and, sure enough, it exposed UB in safe Rust.

I mean yeah, that's what this whole post is about. It's about the process of going from that original state to something that's now shipping in production.

theLiminator2• 14 days ago

That's the power of a strong test suite. LLMs excel when you have verifiable rewards. I imagine we'll get a lot more rewritten in rust projects in the future. Rust is also an ideal target for such rewrites as it offers a lot of verification (via its type system) and is low overhead with zero-gc. There's less and less reason to use GC'd languages in the agentic coding era.

I think Rust is a locally optimal target for LLM coding, we might see a better language in the future, but I think Rust will dominate for quite some time.

lifthrasiir6• 14 days ago

There's less and less reason to use GC'd languages in the agentic coding era.

Faster iteration, maybe? Rust's safety guarantee isn't exactly free (while still being very excellent) and does affect iteration time. I have a private project (>300K LoC) that has been translated from Python to TypeScript and the reason we couldn't use Rust was definitely the iteration time.

gpm5• 14 days ago

Eh... rust's safety isn't free, but not having it and wasting time on "oh I forgot to change this call site" also isn't free. On the whole I'd say the safety assists in iteration time.

What costs rust in iteration time in my opinion is the low level (by default) nature of it. There's a faster-to-iterate language that has yet to be created which is rust but we sacrifice performance (and memory fiddling ergonomics for the odd person who does that) so we don't have to worry about things like whether a variable is stack or heap allocated. Which is in the direction of a GCed language but retains the mutable-xor-aliasable semantics.

Between rust and current GCed languages though... I guess I agree with "maybe" in both directions.

talloaktrees• 14 days ago

I like using Odin with LLMs for this. it's a simple statically typed language with no GC and very fast compile

YuechenLi2• 14 days ago

Combined with the Rust rewrite, ICU changes, and identical code folding, Bun's binary size shrinks by ~20% on Linux & Windows.

People who are surprised by this probably has not seen what Zig code actually looks like. Zig's explicitness and lack of abstraction have a real cost that it is basically one of the most verbose programming languages I've ever seen, it's somehow even more verbose than Go. Basic features of modern languages like pattern matching and generics, and as you can see, having to manually clean up everything means that if you forget once, it's a memory leak. Having SOME abstraction is actually good if it prevents you from making mistakes.

Ironically, Zig is a programming language that's probably best written by LLMs, since they can actually tolerate the verbosity.

giancarlostoro6• 14 days ago

Ironically, Zig is a programming language that's probably best written by LLMs, since they can tolerate actually tolerate the verbosity.

Rust in my opinion feels the same.

sroussey• 14 days ago

Agree. But just because it feels the same doesn’t mean it compiles the same.

honeycrispy• 14 days ago

That can often depend on how you write it.

afavour• 14 days ago

I don’t feel the verbosity with Rust. Haven’t written it in a while but now in the LLM era I’m looking forward to saying “sort out the lifetime errors for me”.

pjjpo• 14 days ago

I have found LLMs struggle with Rust's constraints - they are optimized to produce code that passes the tests, not necessarily good code. So instead of working out lifetimes and borrowing, it will be happy to copy a buffer many times without thought. This means I have to still go through line by line to review and often rewrite either by hand or with another LLM iteration.

There may be some prompting that can help with this but I suspect there is a fundamental tension between writing working code vs good code in LLMs. Go is popular for being simple, making it easy to jump in and write something fast and stable - minimizing the gap between working and good code probably helps out the LLMs a lot.

benced7• 14 days ago

Not a compiler expert - shouldn't language verbosity and binary size be, at best, very loosely related?

steveklabnik9• 14 days ago

I don't think you can draw the conclusion that source length and binary size are correlated. For example, in Rust:

    #[derive(Copy, Clone)]
    enum Expr {
        Int(i32),
        Add(i32, i32),
        Neg(i32),
    }
    
    fn eval(expr: Expr) -> i32 {
        match expr {
            Expr::Int(x) => x,
            Expr::Add(a, b) => a + b,
            Expr::Neg(x) => -x,
        }
    }

Rust's enums can carry data. You can write the same thing in C, but because it does not have the enum feature, you have to do it yourself. They're sometimes called "tagged unions" for a reason, you use a union + a tag when doing it by hand:

    #include <stdint.h>
    
    typedef enum {
        EXPR_INT,
        EXPR_ADD,
        EXPR_NEG,
    } ExprTag;
    
    typedef struct {
        ExprTag tag;
        union {
            struct {
                int32_t value;
            } Int;
    
            struct {
                int32_t left;
                int32_t right;
            } Add;
    
            struct {
                int32_t value;
            } Neg;
        };
    } Expr;
    
    int32_t eval(Expr expr) {
        switch (expr.tag) {
            case EXPR_INT:
                return expr.Int.value;
    
            case EXPR_ADD:
                return expr.Add.left + expr.Add.right;
    
            case EXPR_NEG:
                return -expr.Neg.value;
        }
    
        __builtin_unreachable();
    }

I haven't actually compiled this, but it should compile to almost the exact same, if not literally the exact same, machine code. Yet one is way more verbose than the other.

YuechenLi2• 14 days ago

Fair point, I phrased that too broadly, and you are right about the loose correlation.

What I was gesturing at, badly, was more that Zig’s low-abstraction / explicit-by-default syntax tends to have you write more boilerplate-y code in general that are more annoying to write and maintain, while not buying you enough over a language with better tooling and ecosystem and compiler optimization like Rust.

surajrmal• 14 days ago

Why? Python is terse but has large binaries because of the runtime overhead. C++ is fairly verbose but can make useful binaries in double digit kib.

bsder• 14 days ago

Naive was 4-9% on the initial pass.

Also note that the larger percentages were against already smaller binaries. That smells like there was a single large constant number that got saved somewhere rather than general improvements.

After that initial shrinkage, the team explored more opportunities for binary size reduction using linker optimizations like Identical Code Folding, removing unused data from ICU, and lazily decompressing small parts of libicu with a zstd dictionary on-demand.

I'd be VERY interested in seeing what the individual effects of those parts were.

typ• 14 days ago

Abstraction doesn't necessarily lead to a smaller binary. Much of the bloat in modern software is indeed due to (bad) abstractions.

tapirl2• 14 days ago

Zig is indeed verbose in some aspects, but not overall. For example, its `try error-union` syntax eliminates a lot of boilerplate code.

The main reason why Zig is verbose in some aspects is the main goal of Zig is program performance. It is a worthy tradeoff.

NetMageSCW2• 13 days ago

That goal doesn’t imply verbosity is necessary- just a style thing which is contrary to its goal of being a better C, given verbosity is the opposite of most C.

reinitctxoffset2• 14 days ago

The twenty percent quoted is referring to the size of the compiled artifact (one assumes ELF or Mach-O).

Whether or not a language is verbose or obscure is very much about your coordinate system. Not unlike safety.

I think C is a reasonable zero for both things.

Zig is more succinct and safer than C while still being comparably ergonomic. Rust is (mostly) safer and more succinct than Zig while being dramatically less ergonomic (take it up with Wadler memory chads, no one likes affine types).

I like lean4, which is dramatically safer, more succinct, and more ergonomic than Rust.

But I can see why some would say it's a bit too succinct.

metaltyphoon• 14 days ago

Rust is (mostly) safer and more succinct than Zig while being dramatically less ergonomic

This is just your opinion.

ianm218• 14 days ago

Inspired by this project I ported most of Valkey to Rust here valdr.dev .

The coolest outcome was being able to run a redis comparible store on an a cloudflare durable object so you do I.e. rate limiting for free with little infra.

giancarlostoro6• 14 days ago

So I kept hearing that the author did this purely because Anthropic wanted a PR story, but reading this entire very well written post, with meticulous detail, what say you now? I never thought it made any sense for him to do this just because Anthropic asked him to. Sometimes you find yourself fighting the stack you're currently using, and another stack (or programming language) looks like it would alleviate a lot. LLM was just another tool in his toolbelt. I had already ported projects that were old and abandoned before using Claude Code, so I knew it was possible.

nozzlegear• 14 days ago

what say you now?

I think that when you have a $165,000 hammer, all of your problems begin to look a lot like nails.

giancarlostoro6• 14 days ago

I've done rewrites like this, maybe it wasn't Zig to Rust, but I have been able to rewrite sizable projects, from C# to Rust before. I incorporated a similar strategy, have Claude Opus review the codebase, write a spec, then have Claude implement it, while reviewing the spec, and using the codebase as fallback and gospel over the spec. That said, it's not the entire story here as I said, there was a lot of thought put into it, it it had not been done with Claude, I have a feeling he might have started an "experimental" version of Bun in Rust instead, as many developers have done in the past before LLMs.

benced7• 14 days ago

I would guess the cost to do this with humans would be _at least_ $1.5M in compensation alone (I'm thinking three 500k/year Bay Area engineers) so this is already an order of magnitude cheaper.

Is it worth $165K? I'm less sure of that but it's honestly a moot point - this will get to 5 then 4 digits of cost pretty fast.

johnfn• 14 days ago

So much of the discourse around this on HN is nonsensical, and I fully agree with you. It's patently absurd that Anthropic would demand him to rewrite Bun into Rust; it's equally absurd that they would demand any sort of stunt at all when Anthropic already pulled off the biggest stunt with Bun: running Claude Code on it. And why on earth would you cannibalize the runtime of your golden goose?

hansvm2• 14 days ago

Every time I've rewritten a major project I've made it smaller and faster while fixing all the major bugs and most of the minor ones. My current team has had similar experiences. I'd be curious to see what a Zig -> Zig rewrite of the same magnitude would have done for quality.

tangenter• 14 days ago

Should we brace for another front page Zig donation announcement? A fast follow with a “Why Zig?” penance piece, replete with anecdotes about how it is the only true way to express oneself?

SergeAx• 14 days ago

I still think that generating a Zig-Rust transpiler would be a better approach, given all the LLM quirks, including the ability to just /goal the model with binary-identical LLVM bytecode.

However, an open-sourced tool like that would've greatly harmed the Zig ecosystem and community.

ivanjermakov• 14 days ago

would've greatly harmed the Zig ecosystem and community

People looking to abandon the ship first chance are unlikely to contribute much to the ecosystem and community.

leecommamichael4• 14 days ago

Go famously used machine translation to remove dependency from C. It's a nice way to retain structural familiarity with the target language. I imagine they could've saved a large portion of that $165,000 using this route. Hard to say for certain, though. You wouldn't want to scope that transpiler at "being able to transpile all programs generally," and so scoping the project does become a serious task.

pier258• 14 days ago

Compiler errors are a better feedback loop than a style guide

So essentially this whole re-write was about making Bun LLM compatible.

didibus2• 14 days ago

to exhaustively come up with reasons why the changes create bugs or do not work

My biggest issue currently, is I can't seem to get a code review that's about the simplicity of the code, and no /simplify ain't it. Removing certain bugs and generally working seems to be doing alright, especially if it's following either an example code (like in the Bun rewrite case) or a well defined "spec" of how to proceed.

himata4113• 14 days ago

They didn't mention the cost of this. Assuming mythos was somewhat involved I'd extrapolate this as: 128 x20 max accounts needed which comes at $25.6k or over 75k in api costs. For 75k you can hire a team of engineers that would produce a better result with sematic conversion and other tricks used in porting from language A to language B at the cost of maybe taking 1 month instead of 10 days.

I will be a lot more excited when this is possible with <10k of api costs.

fps-hero• 14 days ago

Pre-merge, this took 5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads — around $165,000 at API pricing. By hand, I think this would've taken 3 engineers with full context on the codebase about a year, during which time we wouldn't be able to improve Node.js compatibility, fix bugs, fix security issues or implement new features. We never would've done that. The realistic alternative was to do nothing and keep fixing the bugs at the top of this post forever.

erichocean3• 14 days ago

Even at $165K, it's worth it to have a better base to build on top of—especially since it didn't take a year's worth of time for three programmers.

incognito1242• 14 days ago

It states $165k in the article

JavierFlores09• 14 days ago

I don't think the realistic alternative here was “hire a team for a month and get a better semantic conversion”

For a rewrite of this size, the expensive part is deep understanding of the underlying system in order to preserve behavior while keeping performance, and above all that not freezing product work while doing it. Adding more engineers would just end up in managerial burden and review bottlenecks, to say the least.

So even assuming the API cost estimate is high, I don't buy the “just hire engineers for a month” take. A team unfamiliar with the codebase would probably spend a large chunk of that month just building context and deciding how not to break everything. A team familiar with the codebase is even more valuable doing product work, bug fixes, and review of the existing codebase.

So, in short, I do agree with the simple fact that this is still too expensive for most projects, but not with the idea that “a small team would trivially do better in a month”.

Buttons8402• 14 days ago

I've always felt [0] the people who created Bun had, as their first and foremost goal, a desire to use Zig--and that's great, I like Zig, I like when people build things their own way.

However, I've been skeptical of using Bun, because I want a project whose first and foremost goal is to build good tools that achieve the objectives of the project.

It reminds me of asking game developers: Do you want to build a game, or do you want to build a game engine? Building a game engine is fine, but if you're goal is to make a game, then building an engine is a poor way of achieving your goals.

Likewise, I've wondered if the creators of Bun wanted to build better JavaScript tools, or if they wanted to use Zig.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970044

ameliaquining• 14 days ago

So does that mean the rewrite made you less skeptical?

Buttons8402• 14 days ago

Yeah, I guess. Now it appears to be a project run by Anthropic and I'm sure the real focus is on making money--which is still slightly different than having the focus be on making the best tool.

MrCheeze• 14 days ago

I mean, surely the main motivation for "use an LLM to rewrite a huge project in a new language" was excitement about the shiny new tech that made it possible.

didibus2• 14 days ago

Article did a decent job of showing discipline and care and human involvement to assert the automated rewrite was done diligently, as best as it can be when using AI for it. I does make me feel a bit more comfortable about it.

As an aside, I don't know why anyone would not want to use a memory-safe (and possibly race-safe) language in 2026. Rust gives you that in a performant package, so if you are turned off by GCs and immutability for performance reasons, you still have the option to use Rust.

I can understand when you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++, and I also relate with just personal preference, but beyond those it seems a no brainer to me.

leecommamichael4• 14 days ago

As an aside, I don't know why anyone would not want to use a memory-safe (and possibly race-safe) language in 2026.

The rust compiler is very slow. The best way to speed it up appears to be organizing a codebase in many crates. This is not preferable ergonomics to many. Beside that, for many problems, a garbage collector eliminates a large amount of defects (including the ones stated in the article) without any added friction, whereas Rust asks that you think in terms of ownership. This is not preferable ergonomics to many.

I realize what I'm saying above, while true, doesn't give a clear example. Many gamedevs would rather iterate with a language that is lower friction, not only because game code is finnicky (like frontend UI code) but because the build process can be unique. Many gamedevs prefer to iterate with hot-reloading, and asking them to use a slower compiler is asking them to accept greater latency in that cycle.

I do not claim that these reasons apply to everyone.

gpm5• 14 days ago

The comment you're replying to wasn't arguing rust > GCed languages (e.g. C# or whatever game dev language you are thinking of). It was arguing rust > non-GC non-safe languages (e.g. zig).

kibwen3• 14 days ago

The best way to speed it up appears to be organizing a codebase in many crates.

A "crate" in Rust is the unit of compilation. In C, a file is the unit of compilation. Rust just lets you have a compilation unit that's composed of more than one file (without having to resort to C-style textual inclusion). But if you want, you can certainly have one-file-per-crate, just like you would in C. And what's nice about having many crates is that crates forbid circular dependencies, which trivially enables coarse-grained parallelism in the build system. So yes, organizing a large codebase into crates is the best way to achieve parallelism, but that isn't something to be deplored (and strictly controlling circular dependencies is useful for comprehending large codebases in general).

zamalek2• 14 days ago

Game engines are typically in two languages, one for the engine itself and one for scripting. That even goes for Unity: in Unity, C# is a significantly more powerful than average scripting language (for lack of a better term), but the engine itself is still C++.

That's not to say that you couldn't write a commercial game engine with something like C# that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with unity and unreal, but it doesn't seem like anyone has attempted to do so. Maybe it's the decompilation fear.

Also, it would continue to make sense to use a scripting language alongside Rust.

vlovich1234• 14 days ago

For what it’s worth game devs often use C# or C++ engines which have even worse issues. Rust also has the early beginnings of hot reload which bevy adopted if I recall correctly [1]. I still think a higher level language is good for “business” logic to orchestrate how efficient low-level pieces connect, but Rust is holding its own even against those use cases IMHO.

[1] https://docs.rs/hot-lib-reloader/latest/hot_lib_reloader/

stymaar5• 14 days ago

The rust compiler is very slow.

It's not “very slow”, that's a tired meme. It's slower than it could/should, but complaining about rustc being “very slow” is a clear misrepresentation, especially when everybody seems to have been fine with tsc's historical performance for instance. It could be nice if it was faster indeed, but people claiming it's “very slow” are just showing they never worked with it.

The best way to speed it up appears to be organizing a codebase in many crates. This is not preferable ergonomics to many.

In this context (where you don't plan on publishing you stuff on crates.io) a “crate” are just a directory at the root of your repo, the ergonomic impact is literally zero.

psychoslave3• 14 days ago

Hey thanks for teaching me a word today, and to be finicky myself, the convention seems to be to use a single n it. :)

IshKebab6• 14 days ago

The rust compiler is very slow.

It was very slow. It's gotten a lot faster over time (over 2x faster). It's still not exactly fast, but it's definitely faster than C++. Although C++'s slow compile times are often complained about they were never really enough to stop most people using it, including for games.

a garbage collector eliminates a large amount of defects (including the ones stated in the article) without any added friction

I'd be careful about that "without any added friction". Rust's lifetime/borrowing system tends to lead to less buggy code because it encourages structuring code in a less spaghetti way. GC does eliminate memory errors but you also lose that non-spaghetti code structure.

thayne• 14 days ago

Beside that, for many problems, a garbage collector eliminates a large amount of defects (including the ones stated in the article)

Languages with garbage collection are generally considered "memory safe". GP was talking about choosing a language that requires manual memory management, but doesn't have something like rust's lifetimes to catch things like use-after-free.

henry_bone2• 14 days ago

I'll bite. The first language I could "just write" in was C. I had internalised the language and its standard lib and didn't need the internet to work with it.

Rust is pushed by many as the replacement to C, because of the memory safety guarantees. I'm sympathetic. I worked with Haskell for a time, so I get it. But Rust seems quite complex. There are so many language features that there's memes about it. There's also the friction and learning curve.

So, for fun, I choose zig because, like C, I can hold most of the language in my head and "just write." I choose zig because it does a great deal to help me write correct and highly performant code. I can use arena allocators and defer and cure my code of many memory issues. Then there's the various language rules around pointers (optionals, slices, etc) that help me write correct code. There's the built in testing and the test allocator. I love that comptime and the build system are not special cases, but rather are just garden variety zig. I love the simplicity and elegance of it all.

I also choose zig because I prefer the liberty it affords me. I am responsible for each and every allocation. It appeals to my libertarian sensiblities.

kibwen3• 14 days ago

There are so many language features that there's memes about it.

Like many memes, these are misleading. Rust is a solidly medium-sized language; smaller than Python, certainly, though with a perilously steeper learning curve than Python.

baq2• 14 days ago

The first language I could "just write" in was C. I had internalised the language and its standard lib and didn't need the internet to work with it.

I bet $4.20 you didn’t write C. You wrote something C-like which the compiler didn’t reject because the C standard has a gigantic surface of ‘undefined behavior’ which means once your program does one thing out of spec it isn’t C anymore silently.

pdimitar2• 13 days ago

Of all the things I expected to read today on HN, "I chose a programming language that appeals to my political leanings" was certainly not one of them.

frizlab2• 14 days ago

My personal memory and concurrent-safe option is Swift. And I agree, choosing a non-memory safe language for a new project is close to irresponsible today…

pjmlp14• 13 days ago

Sometimes we have no option, given the industry standards that expect C or C++.

Khronos, Open Group, NVidia, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo... aren't going to change their APIs and SDKs, just because of social media discussions on the merits of C, C++ vs other safer alternatives.

I agree we should minimise their use, however not everyone accepts a dual language approach, nor there are alternatives in such domains, even if they technically exist, you still need to overcome the human and political factors.

Hence why it is so relevant to fix C and C++ security flaws to some extent as well.

rvrb2• 14 days ago

that you understand and think dropping down to C++ is what you need to do when you "need the best performance" is quite enough of a tell to invalidate the rest of your opinion here. if you "need the best performance", you need to ditch OOP and RAII, and you're probably reaching for C. Zig wants to be the better choice there. that's a perfectly reasonable niche for a language to exist in.

if you read the article carefully, jarred is pretty clear about how their specific requirements with Bun cause friction when bridging the manual memory management of Zig with a garbage collected JS runtime. at face value, that makes quite a lot of sense to me, and it's a pretty specific scenario that is not the full on condemnation of memory unsafe languages that your comment is.

remexre• 14 days ago

the point of c++ when you need max perf is to be able to maintain the compile-time abstractions you need w/ templates instead of macros and undocumented optimizer behavior, not oop or raii

gmadsen• 14 days ago

It is widely accepted that you can get better performance with c++ far easier than C. Outside of custom rolling assembly , a large aspect of performance tuning is compile time optimization, which is extremely non trivial in C, while being supported in language with C++. All the things people associate with C performance can be done in C++, the converse is not true

Gigachad2• 14 days ago

I've observed that dumber models are able to vibecode in safe languages a lot easier since the compiler errors can self correct the models hallucinations, while they end up marking a task as complete in dynamic languages despite it not actually working.

If I'm vibe coding something I'm always just going to do it in Rust.

sneak• 14 days ago

Agree 100%. Almost everything I have written with AI is in Go, and strong typing is really really nice (as is go vet and golangci-lint to keep the generated code in line).

I imagine writing plain js or python with it would be much much riskier.

sitzkrieg2• 14 days ago

rust is still a non starter in some niche embedded applications (way too big). i still write c and assembly constantly.

steveklabnik9• 14 days ago

way too big

https://github.com/tormol/tiny-rust-executable

This produces a 137 byte binary. Obviously AMD64 isn't used in embedded, but I've seen ARM ones that are in the ~256 range.

It's all in how you use it. Of course, if you don't care about binary sizes, they can get large, but that's very different than actually paying attention to what you're doing.

swiftcoder• 14 days ago

niche embedded applications

How niche are we talking? Rust is deployed on a bunch of popular microcontrollers at this point

josephg6• 14 days ago

I can understand when you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++

Rust is just as fast as C++.

m00dy3• 14 days ago

yeap, unfortunately, only few can see this.

lionkor5• 14 days ago

It depends just how fast you need it. C++ is much easier to get to zero abstraction code.

In Rust you are constantly fighting the stdlib and other libraries, and you have to litter your hot code with unsafe blocks to get it to stop adding a branch to nearly every object access, be it for bounds checks or over/underflow checks.

C++ does a much better job at giving you a zero abstraction API, and you can always drop down to raw pointers if you want, without(!!!!) unsafe blocks and weird tricks. Of course it's unsafe in C++ but the friction to writing a branchless hot loop is muuuuch smaller.

When profiling and optimizing Rust code, I very often find myself poring over the generated code, making small changes, reading api docs, and trying again, much more than in C++. Lots of unsafe Rust APIs are not even nearly good enough, even with most checks turned off you will find branches that just branch to panic!(), which is, you guessed it, still more code and a branch than the code would suggest.

I get why people think that most systems languages are the same "speed", but they really are not if you are hitting limits of the hardware in your hot loops.

yukIttEft• 14 days ago

Is it though.

There are so many situations where something is guaranteed to be safe but there is no way to express that in the Rust typesystem, so the only thing you can do is to wrap everything in Arcs and Mutexes, which introduces allocations, pointerchasing and locks

flohofwoe5• 14 days ago

and you decide to drop to down to C++

Going from Rust to C++ seems a strange choice, since you get most of the same problems just without memory safety. Zig, Odin, C3 or even plain old C though? At least those languages have things to offer that neither Rust nor C++ provide (and if it's just compilation speed).

pjmlp14• 13 days ago

Market share, IDE and graphics tooling, and industry standards.

LLVM is not going to take PRs written in Rust to fix the Rust compiler backend, for example.

Neither are OpenJDK, .NET, V8, JSCore going to take such PRs.

By the way, LLVM and GCC would also not take PRs written in C.

testdelacc1• 14 days ago

I can understand when you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++

Could you help me understand with an example or two? My understanding is that well written Rust and C++ are often identical in performance thanks to relying on the same compiler backend (both clang and rustc use LLVM).

aldanor• 14 days ago

Even, possibly, the other way around in some cases. A seemingly identical program may (and it does occur) compile to a faster machine code in rust than in C++ due to extra markers (eg alignment) that rust compiler is able to provide to llvm.

rootlocus• 14 days ago

Im constantly surprised by the disk size required by rust builds. It takes over 50G to compile zed IIRC.

OtomotO2• 14 days ago

I can understand when you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++

What? Rust generally doesn't have worse performance to C++, so this argument makes no sense at all to me.

and I also relate with just personal preference, but beyond those it seems a no brainer to me.

That's another argument altogether.

It's totally fine to have preferences and decide to go with them of course.

fulafel• 14 days ago

Fortunately there are also many other memory safe languages to choose from.

canbus• 14 days ago

People get attached to things they've been using for decades. Also most of the world is still written in c/c++ so any critical mass has quite a lot to go up against.

Rust isn't perfect but it solves a lot of the pitfalls of C++ (not just UB, package management, horrible cmake files, linker errors etc.)

egorfine11• 14 days ago

and human involvement

Isn't ironic for a project that successfully killed all past and future human involvement?

pjmlp14• 14 days ago

The main reason to use C++, and Rust compiler also falls into it, is existing infrastructure, SDKs and industry standards.

I would love that Java and .NET would provide all layers like several managed languages in the 90's,

However it has taken a quarter century to get back features we already had in Modula-3, Mesa, Oberon and co.

xiaoyu2006• 14 days ago

Ownership is a very limiting coding constraint, and bypassing methods, when ultimately needed (e.g. cell), cannot be engineered to be ergonomical.

randypewick• 14 days ago

Rust is C++ like language, with more safety. It makes no sense to say that to get performance one can drop down to C++. As far as I am aware, you can get as fast as C with Rust. Of course, that might mean to compromise on something, some bound checks, some code ergonomics, or something else. You can write ASM in Rust, so it really gets as low level as it gets. And what I find amazing is that, similarity to C++, you can get both low level and high level code in the same language. And this is intrinsic in the language complexity: if you take a simpler language with a less powerful type system (C-class languages), you lose this ability.

ryukoposting• 13 days ago

tl;dr: my job requires me to do things where Rust's memory model can't save me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833867

andrepd• 13 days ago

This comment makes no sense. For one, "you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++", no, C++ and Rust are virtually equivalent in that they pretty much expose the underlying machine fully; if anything Rust makes it easier to write idiomatic performant code.

For two, there are plenty of reasons to use C++ unfortunately: compatibility with existing code based and availability of developers to name two.

incognito1242• 14 days ago

In Bun v1.3.14, every build leaks about 3 MB, forever

I'm sorry but that is insane, how was this never fixed before the rewrite?

pier258• 14 days ago

I've been impacted by a couple of bugs in Bun.SQL and lo and behold these were only fixed for 1.4. Presumably Claude could have fixed those in the Zig version but the Bun team decided to not do that.

Furthermore, there's no mention of an LTS plan for the Zig version. It seems that if a CVE is discovered in the future, Bun users will no have no option than to update to the Rust port.

This is not how you run a project that others depend on and enough for me to not touch Bun ever again.

dgacmu2• 14 days ago

I'm a little puzzled: Why should you care? The language in which Bun is written isn't part of its API, if you will. You care that you have something that does various javascripty things according to a particular spec of what it's supposed to do. If a bug is fixed in 1.4.x it's fixed, why should it matter, really, if that's in Zig or Rust?

nzoschke• 14 days ago

Historically, rewrites are a terrible idea.

This changed for me over the last 5 years.

The first scenario was joining a company where a software product barely worked. We did the traditional incremental refactoring / rewriting, but eventually learned how rotten the core was that rewriting from first principles was the best path forward.

The lesson learned here is that the conventional wisdom probably only applies to rewriting complex but working systems.

Then multiple scenarios in the agentic coding age. Between day jobs and hobbies I've reproduced major chunks of complicated software like Salesforce, Gmail, Pioneer Rekordbox with very lean teams.

Much like the blog post, the trick is to get an excellent verification loop with a compiler, linter, and test harness / test suite around the core behaviors.

It's feeling more and more that designing and implementing comprehensive test harnesses is the real work, once you have that let the LLM cook.

yomismoaqui3• 14 days ago

I think the same, it's possible our job will morph into "coding agent herders". In this case I guess the test harnesses, linters, workflows, etc will be our herding dogs.

frollogaston4• 14 days ago

"I used a pre-release version of Claude Fable 5 for much of the Rust rewrite."

It'd be interesting if Anthropic became a general software company just because they have access to models that aren't yet released, possibly export-banned.

dabinat• 14 days ago

This Rust rewrite would've taken a team of engineers with full-context on the codebase a year of work. With 1 engineer using Fable & closely monitoring Claude Code, we went from start to 100% of the test suite passing on all platforms in 11 days.

This is impressive from a technological standpoint, but it does gloss over the fact that it would have cost $165k in tokens were Bun not part of Anthropic.

The comparison here isn’t completely fair - it would take a small team a year to port it if they spent $0 extra on it.

I’d be interested to see a comparison between spending $165k in 11 days on Claude vs splitting that between 50 people over 11 days for a line-by-line rewrite of the Zig code. I suspect Claude might be faster and therefore cheaper, but maybe not by a lot.

tekacs• 14 days ago

I feel like a core difference is that the AI implementor can get cheaper/faster (and indeed _uniformly_ better), whereas it would be very difficult for the same humans to do so.

Even if this is not the right answer today, it can at the very least serve as a herald of a possible future, no?

Philpax3• 14 days ago

I think it'd take you at least eleven days to meaningfully coordinate 50 people!

Jenk• 14 days ago

$165k won't get you far on salaried engineers. There's every chance that 1 engineer, assuming Anthropic employs them, is on $500k or more. Assuming average of $336k in that pool of 50 engineers, then for 11 days for 50 engineers you've spent $710k[0].

Salary info: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anthropic/salaries/software...

[0]The maths I used (posting because I'm tired and prone to mistakes):

    $336,000 / 260 (working days of the year) = ~$1,292.
    $1,292 * 11 * 50 = ~$710,769

bhaak• 14 days ago

You don't need top engineers to port a program from one language to the other. Outsource it to India.

Of course, then you can also ask, could it have been done with a cheaper model. Probably yes. But then you wouldn't get free marketing.

jeremyloy_wt• 14 days ago

They napkin math is fairly easy to do. One human works around 250 days per year, and if we assume Bay Area salaries we could assume ~300k/y conservatively for a fully loaded cost.

$1200 per day.

Your estimation is 50*11 days so $660,000. That’s 4x what Claude cost.

That’s assuming that you actually get those 50 people to work without blockers, stepping on each other, or other coordination issues. The coordination complexity alone is astounding.

I don’t like it necessarily, but Claude wins here, easily. It’s not close.

piskov• 14 days ago

Unless you hire smart people from EU and what have you (especially ex-USSR)

Which takes us to a point of future US dev salaries if this thing with agents gets better more and more

slopinthebag• 14 days ago

Why assume the upper level salary here? Using senior level developers making astronomical salaries for what is a mechanical line-by-line port would be a poor financial decision.

What does the math look like with 25 devs making ~100k and doing it in 22 days? I’m sure you could find a reasonable combination which costs less. And if you’re already paying the devs the salary, it’s basically free (minus the opportunity cost of them not working on other things).

these• 14 days ago

That’s assuming that you actually get those 50 people to work without blockers, stepping on each other, or other coordination issues. The coordination complexity alone is astounding.

This is a question of exceptional management, which needs to be present both in the Claude and human cases, and is scarce. Not everyone given the Claude tokens would be able to deliver the same result.

ignoramous• 14 days ago

I suspect Claude might be faster and therefore cheaper, but maybe not by a lot.

While Jarred used Mythos-class model, some open weights, if they were as capable (certainly, GLM 5.2 looks the part), would have been way, way cheaper than professionals.

Approx costs:

  DeepSeek v4 Pro & Mimo v2.5 Pro   $3,426  ($2,567 / $600 / $259)
  Tencent HY3                       $3,892  ($1,180 / $552 / $2,160)
  GLM 5.2                          $30,016  ($8,260 / $3,036 / $18,720)
  Qwen 3.7 Max                     $37,925  ($14,750 / $5,175 / $18,000)
  Claude Opus 4.8 & GPT 5.5 xhigh  $82,750  ($29,500 / $17,250 / $36,000)

  5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, 72 billion cached input token reads.

nsoonhui• 14 days ago

But not all models are equally capable, so I don't know your basis of comparison is even valid, let alone the numbers.

KronisLV4• 14 days ago

I did some more sizeable work with GLM 5.2 on Max reasoning (planning and implementing 8 features end to end) and it performed pretty well, but worse than Opus 4.8, with largely the same adversarial agent review loop.

Opus 4.8 still found some real issues afterwards and spent about an hour fixing things, before the code was good enough to ship. Overall promising, wrote about it here: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model...

The GLM Coding Plan seems to have lower token limits than the corresponding Anthropic Max subscriptions, but if you had to pay API rates for some LLM to do work somewhat reliably, it's a no brainer (unless you're swimming in money that you can give away and value your time more).

yomismoaqui3• 14 days ago

Your example of using 50 people for this reminded me of the classic “Nine women can’t make a baby in one month.”

HINT: those 50 people must be coordinated...

achristmascarl• 14 days ago

I was fairly skeptical about the rewrite when news about it first started going around, and I still don't plan on switching anything to use the Bun rewrite anytime soon, but I appreciate how detailed and well-written the blog post is; it also seems to be primarily human-authored, in my opinion, which is refreshing.

The most significant revelation for me was that Claude Code has been using the rewrite without much fanfare since June 17th.

sashank_1509• 14 days ago

I think the important thing is this is much cheaper than hiring a software engineering team. They could have hired me for 200k and I could not do this in a year. I do not have the context, and I do not know Zig or Rust, perhaps I could pick it up in a month, but I would be extremely slow.

Forgetting all the predictions about singularity etc, at the very least AI as it is now, is going to make it very hard to justify hiring a SWE for 200k. I will say, at the very top for a software heavy company like Google or Anthropic, they will still hire excellent engineers to create new software that AI is not very good at.

But for companies where software is simply a cost center. Like Walmart, or Target, companies that were already outsourcing software development, or using cheap H1bs, now they have the alternative of AI which is much better than even hiring an average software engineer for 200k. This is a sea change in the job market, it’s going to have a pretty big effect as it is right now. US has around 1.6 Million software developers, this number is going to get cut drastically, the very top, say an L6 quality in FAANG will be fine, the average in a no name Bank, or the guy building the website for McDonalds is out, he needs to learn something else or he’ll end up without a job soon.

I would not have predicted this a year ago, now it seems clear that this will happen. Just shows how much of a sea change we have witnessed just like that.

jameskraus• 14 days ago

It's funny, I see the opposite and I would only trust a senior engineer with conducting such a wide-reaching change. I would be more likely to hire a senior engineer who might now be able to effect such change.

metalspot2• 14 days ago

Exactly. AI opens up a massive development frontier of projects that were simply impossible before. It does differentiate though. In the old world most "software engineering" work had nothing to do with software engineering so being highly skilled, educated, and experienced in software engineering made very little difference in compensation, position, promotion, etc. "software engineer" isn't a real thing anyway. coding is a secretarial job. you have to move beyond the mindset that coding is doing something useful. it's not. it is a means to an end and now better means exist. if you want to be an engineer you have to think in terms of systems engineering and building systems that deliver defined externally testable capabilities. in a few more years the idea of reading and writing source code will seem as absurd as reading and writing asm seems today.

galleywest200• 14 days ago

If you already employed the engineers the extra cost would have been $0.

minimaxir3• 14 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

Gigachad2• 14 days ago

I'm not so pessimistic. There is an infinite amount of work that could be done. No one would have entertained the idea of rewriting a project in Rust before this. It hasn't replaced anyone's actual job and they still had to hire a high paid employee to pull it off.

I suspect rather than hire less people we will just produce more code changes.

diarrhea• 14 days ago

But do the markets care about a Postgres in Rust? Probably not, or at least not right away. It is a long way towards commercial success.

I suspect rather than hire less people we will just produce more code changes.

Why? Towards what end? Code changes are output, not outcome. It also needs to be connected to someone willing to pay you hard cash. That is the hard part, a race to the bottom, and the reason I also believe there will be downwards pressure on salaries and even employment.

matt_kantor• 14 days ago

No one would have entertained the idea of rewriting a project in Rust before this.

I largely agree with your comment, but is this sentence typo'd or something? "Rewrite it in Rust" happens so often that it's become a meme (and that was so before the rise of agentic coding).

Maybe you meant to say that nobody would have entertained the idea of rewriting this project in Rust?

eightyfive• 14 days ago

They could have hired me for 200k and I could not do this in a year. I do not have the context, and I do not know Zig or Rust, perhaps I could pick it up in a month, but I would be extremely slow.

All that really proves is that you’d be an astoundingly poor choice to hire. If you’re spending $200k on someone that doesn’t know at least two out of three (context, Rust, or Zig), you’re just burning money.

That’s not to say that experienced engineers familiar with the stack would or wouldn’t be able to do it in a year, but they’d certainly have a better shot at it.

It’s also not that this project sprung into thin air from a quick prompt and LLM magic… it was driven by a dedicated, highly talented, subject matter expert with extensive SWE background and extensive support from the leading experts in the world. You’ll continue to need someone to steer the ship, even in the Wal-Marts and Targets. An LLM is only ever as good as the input it’s given.

solid_fuel2• 14 days ago

Ehh, I think this take needs a grain of salt.

There's a few significant facts here:

- They had an existing functional Zig implementation

- They had an existing test suite for the Zip implementation

- They had a separate JavaScript compliance test suite with ~ 1 million tests

- The person overseeing the rewrite was responsible for a huge portion of the existing codebase and was very familiar with the existing architecture and problems

I don't think that middle management at most companies is going to be starting from that same point when it comes to building or updating something. Generally, I don't think there are many projects out there that have such robust existing tests and specifications.

In this case, the engineering behind the tests and specifications need to also be considered part of the process, since without those you wouldn't be able to build a control loop in the same way.

Also I'm pretty sure Walmart directly hires software engineers and doesn't just outsource everything - https://careers.walmart.com/us/en/results?searchQuery=softwa...

karatchov• 14 days ago

You are missing the big picture here The AI literally was able to do a year's work of a top notch developer team in just 11 days (mainly because of a lot of human intervention, otherwise it would have been faster) Why do you think its cant or wont be able to replace the lead developer and/or designer's 11 day job !

and btw, if it can write code, it can write tests and test suite

Ai has come a long way, 2 years ago, this task would be impossible ! 1 year ago, it would hit a dead-end in the first hours of the execution

This blog post is nothing short of an amazing and fascinating tale, yet in some aspect very very scary ...

metalspot2• 14 days ago

Every single SaaS app will be completely rewritten in the next couple years. Fair warning. If you aren't on that train you won't have a job.

koe123• 14 days ago

I think this problem is especially perfect for an LLM though. Its effectively translating with a great test harness.

As for your other arguments, I’m not certain we won’t just Jevon's Paradox into more work.

ozgrakkurt2• 14 days ago

It is highly debatable if a 200k cost engineer that is suitable for the job wouldn’t bring in more value.

Also it is debatable they got any value at all from this. Anyone who wrote unsafe rust and also wrote zig would know that unsafe rust is much much more unsafe in comparison

hdjrudni4• 14 days ago

It's only 4% unsafe and most of it is single-line pointers that came from C++

At the time of writing, about 4% of Bun's Rust code sits inside an unsafe block (~13,000 unsafe keywords across ~27,000 lines / ~780,000 lines), and 78% of those blocks are a single line — a pointer that came from C++, or one call into a C library.

I don't know much about Rust but I imagine this is safer than 100% 'unsafe' code in Zig or C++.

worldsavior• 14 days ago

Getting tired of these comments trying to hype AI. All of us use AI, and if we don't, we have a reason. Chill.

ksec3• 14 days ago

Not only that. I think most of us, including the author wouldn't have thought this was actually feasible.

Not only is the time and dollar spent lower than a lot of people expected. We could now foresee a lot of these human interaction, mistakes, time and cost could be further reduced by a factor of 2, 5 or even 10+ in the not far future.

Also worth taking into account what is stated in the blog post is also acting as PR piece for Claude and LLM in general.

Sammi2• 14 days ago

"In economics, the Jevons paradox is said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. Greater efficiency reduces the amount of the resource needed per application, lowering its effective cost; if demand is sufficiently price elastic, this induces demand, frequently resulting in a net increase of total resource consumption."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

jackdoe3• 14 days ago

the elastic demand will be consumed by ai

jevon's paradox just says people will consume more software as software gets cheaper, which is likely true, not that there will be more high paid jobs for programmers.

as programmers are not the resource, the program is the resource, programmers were the means of production of said resource.

stated differently: in a world where you dont need programmers to make programs, there is infinity of programs, and no jobs for programmers.

IshKebab6• 14 days ago

I think the important thing is this is much cheaper than hiring a software engineering team. They could have hired me for 200k and I could not do this in a year.

Sure, if you're wasting money in silicon valley. They could have hired in Europe and got three people for $300k, which is only double what they spent.

I think the time is the really significant factor, not the money. I bet if they had the option of paying $300k to have it done by humans rather than AI, but magically in a week instead of a year, they would have gone for that instead. $300k is nothing to Anthropic.

karmasimida• 14 days ago

It is possible because they hired the original author of Bun to do this.

It won't be possible to HIRE anyone doing this job confidently, they won't even know if they f*ked up.

I am not too worried anyway, one person with no context, with or without AI, can't do this job. Just like with all the AIs you have, giving you 10 millions, you still can't build a AAA game, it is that simple.

OGWhales2• 13 days ago

This project is very well suited for AI. It's not clear to me if AI is nearly as good or cheap when building things that are new, where it doesn't have an existing target to match and doesn't have an existing test suite to bounce off of and has the benefit of being lead by an actual human with a very intimate understanding of the codebase.

endospore12• 13 days ago

Ha. You'll be surprised when you find out how much new problems were created in the code base precisely because the author's (not sure if it's still the right word here, they barely involved) lack of knowledge of Rust.

And no, since they don't know they don't know about it, there are no signs of fixes around these real issues. They had posted something about the unsafe usage, but lol most of the UBs are casually swept away (not even treated as unsoundness), if you actually look at the code and the summary.

insanitybit13• 13 days ago

As opposed to the known problems caused by using Zig?

sdevonoes• 13 days ago

Nah. You got it wrong. Don’t think too much of yourself, pal

deterministic2• 13 days ago

I am seeing the complete opposite. 200k senior engineers can now do large scale projects way beyond what they could do just a year ago. My company is now able to implement stuff that we used to only dream about. Having 200k senior engineers who master AI coding is a true super power.

Barrin922• 14 days ago

the thing I don't understand about this, given that the goal was a line-by-line transpilation, and the author had already transpiled it once from Go to Zig, why not write an actual transpiler? A problem is as complex as the smallest program required to solve it, and having an LLM, which doesn't produce deterministic output churn through almost 200 grand when you only need to write a deterministic program maybe 5% of that size seems like not a great way to go about this

crote4• 14 days ago

Because the author isn't employed by a transpiler company.

The entire point is to get people to spend money on LLMs. Writing a transpiler - even a LLM-coded one - pretty much defeats the purpose.

pohl2• 14 days ago

This is a frequently mentioned criticism. Is there a good argument about why that approach could have been done in the same amount of time? Seems like larger scope and more uncertainty to me.

Barrin922• 13 days ago

Is there a good argument about why that approach could have been done in the same amount of time?

as I said because it's a much smaller codebase. This is a million lines of code project. A literal Zig to Rust translation that is mostly syntactic is not going to be more than 10-20k LOC for a transpiler. That's two orders of magnitude less work.

suby• 14 days ago

I'm so jaded at this point. The AI translation from Bun to Rust doesn't bother me, I think it's interesting, but that this blog was so clearly written by LLM's is offputting for some reason. I think after having to interact with LLM's for much of the day, it's exhausting to read LLM speak in so many things I see online. It feels almost disrespectful to the reader. It's written from a first person perspective, but Jarred did not write these words.

I was looking forward to this blog post too, but in retrospect I don't know why. I could have had an LLM generate a hypothetical of what this blog post might have looked like and it would have probably been able to get close.

I feel like we've replaced unique voices on the internet with the same style / author, which might be more tolerable if the breathless LLM writing style wasn't so jarring. Contrary to the amount of times "But honestly" or "genuinely" is mentioned, nothing about having your LLM speak for you feels honest or genuine.

I know it's not cool to leave responses like this, but I'm really tired of all of this at this point. The ironic thing too is that it might actually be better to have LLM written text be so distinct so that you can still pick out when a human has actually authored something. Again, this is a blog post from Anthropic about having an AI translate 500k+ lines of code in 11 days, so I guess my disappointment is my fault for expecting otherwise.

jsnell• 14 days ago

that this blog was so clearly written by LLM's is offputting for some reason

It doesn't read at all AI-generated to me. What section do you think is?

(Pangram is very good at distinguishing between AI-generated and human text, and assigns a very low score to the article: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/rewriting...)

Contrary to the amount of times "But honestly" or "genuinely" is mentioned, nothing about having your LLM speak for you feels honest or genuine.

"Honestly" is used once in that post, in a way that's pretty much the core, self-deprecating human use for it ("It would have been possible to do X, but honestly I didn't want to"), rather than the filler word use-case.

"Genuinely" is not used at all.

I know it's not cool to leave responses like this, but I'm really tired of all of this at this point.

I think it is cool to flag AI-generated slop and either leave a comment or upvote an existing comment about it being slop. But only if you are sure it's AI-generated. And sorry to say, you don't seem very well calibrated on this. If you can't actually tell the difference and back up your opinion but are just guessing, then it indeed isn't cool.

egorfine11• 14 days ago

Pangram is very good at distinguishing between AI-generated and human text

It's not.

akanet• 14 days ago

The article is very clearly human written. The author discussed on twitter that he used Claude for visualization and feedback. You can simply say you don't like the writing style, but it is not a very useful comment to have written in any case.

yomismoaqui3• 14 days ago

We need to coin a new term for the paranoic feeling that every text on the internet is written by LLMs.

I propose GPTSD (GPT + PTSD)

EDIT: Another one, AIdar (like gaydar but for AI text). EDIT2: GPTSD has prior art (literally) https://ryanthompson.name/project-gptsd.html

pier258• 14 days ago

Personally I don't care that they used AI to rewrite Bun to Rust. Even if 1.4 is not good enough it will probably get better over time.

What has pushed me back to Node is seeing how amateurish the transition has been handled.

- No LTS support for the Zig version regarding CVEs etc.

- Huge bugs like the 3MB memory leak mentioned in the blog post abandoned in the Zig version to basically force people into the Rust version to fix their apps in production.

- Zero involvement with the Bun community about such a major decision. One day it was "stop the drama I'm just playing with this" and a couple of days later "yolo merged to main".

Jarred basically keeps operating as if he was a lone hacker working on his personal project.

alexjurkiewicz• 14 days ago

Paying customers get LTS. Are any paying customers asking for a Zig branch LTS? Or are you expecting open source maintainers to do free work for no particular reason?

pier258• 14 days ago

Java, Node, and .NET have LTS versions all of which are free to use.

Or are you expecting open source maintainers to do free work for no particular reason?

Free work? Last I heard Anthropic had acquired Bun.

atonse4• 14 days ago

LTS is more relevant if there was any kind of compatibility that was broken. They still haven’t released 1.4 even though it seems to have gone extremely well by every metric in the wild, with tons of people using Claude code with no regressions in a month. Nothing to me suggests they’re being careless here.

In fact, he had two adversarial reviewer Claude instances on every code change, every line. I don’t know a single human team that does two independent reviews of every line, except maybe the people that wrote space shuttle software.

Also they fixed the memory leak. How does it matter what language it’s written in? At the end of the day, people use it to run their typescript code among other things.

How many bun users care that’s it’s written in zig? I certainly don’t. I’ve been using bun for 2 years and I think I looked up zig once. It’s just not relevant.

Did it get more stable? Yes. Slimmer? Yes. More performant? Yes. Is there any proof that it got LESS secure? No. The code has been out for two months. By now all the nay sayers would’ve found the smoking gun. They haven’t. How much more proof would you like that this was a resounding success?

This is our new reality. The agents are so good that projects like this are in the realm of possible. That’s exciting.

pier258• 14 days ago

LTS is more relevant if there was any kind of compatibility that was broken

Do we know 100% for certain that this isn't the case? No.

In fact it would be naive to think a rewrite of this magnitude wouldn't introduce new bugs and/or unexpected changes in behavior.

Nothing to me suggests they’re being careless here.

Plenty of reasons suggest this including the lack of an LTS or any kind of thought put into such a massive transition.

srdjanr2• 13 days ago

I have a few opinions on this:

1) My (and possibly other people's) last impression of this was when it was merged just based on all tests passing. In many projects, relying just on tests would definitely be reckless (not sure about coverage/quality of Bun tests).

I didn't follow much what where they doing later, maybe it is indeed good enough. For example, Claude Code using it and being fine is reassuring.

2) Making such a big decision that quickly and not (even having the time to) consulting community doesn't really inspire confidence.

3) You can be reckless even if everything ends up being perfect in the end.

Going 80mph in a city, you probably have like 80% chance of not crashing. And if you don't crash, you just had a much faster and more fun trip. Doesn't mean it wasn't reckless.

iknowstuff2• 14 days ago

1.4 has no breaking changes from 1.3 so why would there be an LTS and any guarantees for people staying on 1.3? All known regressions have been fixed like any other release as far as I can tell

nicce• 14 days ago

- No LTS support for the Zig version regarding CVEs etc.

Every release would have tons of CVEs and would take so much effort. E.g. the example from blog with memory issues. Better just think that Zig version was not there what comes to security. Use at your own risk.

Jarred basically keeps operating as if he was a lone hacker working on his personal project.

They have right to do it, however. It is expected, especially if company owns it.

srdjanr2• 13 days ago

Of course he has the right to do it, no one disputes that. The users and community also have the right to complain, or stop using and supporting Bun because they don't like his actions

egorfine11• 14 days ago

Zero involvement with the Bun community

Yeah. The human aspect of the transition was just incredibly bad. The person behind Bun has just demonstrated how much he values the community.

But I'm sure he will build another community around this rewrite. After all, there is an abundance of people cheering "Rust rewrites".

Until the new favorite language comes up.

vincnetas• 13 days ago

this reminded me of WoW classics: Leeroy Jenkins

yolo!!!

jgalt212• 13 days ago

One day it was "stop the drama I'm just playing with this" and a couple of days later "yolo merged to main".

Yeah, that was beyond ridiculous.

anonyonoor• 14 days ago

I think we're finally getting to see a glimpse of the future. People and LLMs, working together. (And doing it really well.)

It's pretty exciting.

surround• 14 days ago

It seems that Deno made the right decision by choosing Rust from the get-go.

erk__• 14 days ago

Deno started in Go, but was rewritten in Rust before 0.1

losvedir• 14 days ago

In what ways does Anthropic use Bun? I know it's used as the "runtime" for Claude Code, but rather than porting a million lines of Zig to Rust, why not just port Claude Code to rust and not need to bundle a JS runtime at all? Does Anthropic use Bun otherwise? Maybe for JS execution tool calls in Claude responses?

atonse4• 14 days ago

I’ve wondered the same. Especially because codex is written in rust.

Why not just port Claude code over.

But my guess is that maybe it doesn’t have as robust a test suite?

This might embolden them to do it…

KronisLV4• 14 days ago

But my guess is that maybe it doesn’t have as robust a test suite?

Not sure about what's going on over there, but over the last year Claude Code has gotten way better, I sure hope that they're working on a good enough test suite to avoid a crapload of regressions (and pave way for more refactoring, should they need it).

rane• 14 days ago

It's extremely difficult to have a robust test suite for a TUI app like Claude Code. Hence regressions keep showing up in every update.

ares623• 14 days ago

What does it say that it took 2 months to write the blog post? (or at least have it published)

tln• 14 days ago

That a human wrote it?

cube002• 14 days ago

He's been teasing this blog post everywhere (in commit messages, multiple times on X, here on NH [1]) so I wonder how much of it was building hype compared with it legitimately taking two months to write.

I wonder if the delay of Fable has also been a factor and maybe they didn't want to release this blog post while they couldn't allow customers to use Fable and waste the advertising opportunity.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48133519

rifty• 14 days ago

Super interesting!

I feel like people will make the wrong comparison with the cost to complete. $165000 should be compared to not the cost of a programmer going line by line by hand but someone designing a transpiler from zig to rust. The time to complete is impressive though, if you could spend $165000 and a year of time to find out the rewrite project worked, or instead spend that in a month, you'd probably take that month now that this proof of concept exists out there.

quux0r• 14 days ago

Something that seems to have flown under the radar is that bun was originally a rewrite of Evan Wallace’s work (for those that don’t know, he’s a co founder of figma). What I’d love to know is if Evan’s implementation is largely independent and, if so, says a lot about his skill (even more so than the rest of his impressive catalog) to have a reference-able implementation for what it turned into. Super cool to learn the original implementation motivation for Jarred though.

WhyNotHugo• 14 days ago

around $165,000 at API pricing

This is the bit I was really curious about. Definitely not something within reach for us mortals.

zamadatix6• 14 days ago

On the bright side, that price would continue to drop rapidly even if the models themselves never improved anymore. I'd be very surprised if we didn't actually end up with ~100x cost reduction of this task in the next 10 years between hardware improvements, model perf/$ improvements, and commoditization/conpetition.

For now though it is a bit disappointing trying something like this is relegated to project proposals at work rather than my personal hacking.

smasher164• 14 days ago

It's still shocking to me that the approach taken wasn't to have Claude write a tool that translates Zig to Rust. I imagine it would've been cheaper, deterministic, and each iteration would produce a better tool.

PierceJoy• 14 days ago

This seems like a much much harder problem than having a model translate between the two languages. I think people in general are way overvaluing determinism. In most cases, it doesn’t matter if the output from two runs is different as long as it accomplishes the desired goal.

shimman• 14 days ago

Never thought of cross language code mods to be a thing but surely there are libraries out there that deal with the interop of different ASTs across languages? Seems like an interesting area of research.

erichocean3• 14 days ago

That's the approach I've taken with a bunch of legacy OpenCL code I've mechnically translated to Metal, worked great.

m00dy3• 14 days ago

Rust is the clear winner of LLM era. You can't say otherwise.

grandimam• 14 days ago

The rewrite itself is amazing, but I don't think folks realise the actual conditions that made it possible. It's not as simple as a company spending ~$160K on tokens.

This was done by someone who has essentially already rewritten Node once. Bun itself is a reimplementation of Node, so the author was walking in knowing exactly what the correct behavior is. And an exhaustive amount of test suite to verifiy the changes?. On top of that, there is a reference from Node and V8 to validate more throughly. So the $160K is simply the price of translating knowledge that already lived in one engineer's head in a newer syntax.

hresvelgr• 14 days ago

The condition that made this possible is that this task is well within frontier LLM capability and he had tokens to burn. Domain knowledge is separate to language semantics.

jatins• 14 days ago

Extremely thorough and well written.

I was hoping it’d end in a “so how much did this cost?” so that others team looking at similar migrations have an estimate on what they can expect

marcianx• 14 days ago

It's right there under "Stats":

11 days (May 3 → merged May 14) · 6,778 commits
Pre-merge, this took 5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads — around $165,000 at API pricing. By hand, I think this would've taken 3 engineers with full context on the codebase about a year, during which time we wouldn't be able to improve Node.js compatibility, fix bugs, fix security issues or implement new features. We never would've done that. The realistic alternative was to do nothing and keep fixing the bugs at the top of this post forever.

hdjrudni4• 14 days ago

I was hoping it’d end in a “so how much did this cost?” so that others team looking at similar migrations have an estimate on what they can expect

It was in the middle. $165k.

DennisL123• 14 days ago

In a world without AI/LLMs/agents the rewrite would have been major news how much better software gets when ported to Rust.

lionkor5• 14 days ago

C++ instead of Zig would be a reasonable choice for Bun. We would get constructors & destructors. We could delete lots of extern "C" wrapper code.
But, we would still be reliant on style guides enforced through code review, and even with ASAN, memory corruption and memory leaks would still happen.

Tell me you didn't even look at C++ without telling me you didn't even look at C++. I don't understand this at all, what's missing? There's clang-format, clang-tidy, cppcheck and so many others, what is missing exactly? Memory safety? Then why bring up C++ and style guides(?) at all?

kubb• 14 days ago

Not replying directly to OP, just to people who never coded in C++.

Clang-format doesn’t save you from all C++ footguns, e.g. using exceptions, macros or templates in the wrong way where „wrong“ is defined by a fuzzy set of rules that requires a lot of experience and vigilance to enforce.

jordand• 14 days ago

The thing you have to remember with that $165k spend on tokens is that token prices are going to keep rising, and models may not get much better. I wouldn't be surprised if doing this same migration in 6 months time would end up costing $250k+

capiki• 14 days ago

do you think price per task completed will rise as well?

hdjrudni4• 14 days ago

Isn't that equivalent? The task here was port Bun from Zig to Rust. He's saying that task will cost more.

Havoc• 14 days ago

For sota perhaps but not convinced token price will shoot up if capability is held steady

voidUpdate• 14 days ago

I wonder how much the authors now understand their project? Like, if they were given a bug, would they be able to intuit a possible location in their files that might be causing it? Or are they now essentially locked in to using LLMs to write/rewrite their code?

egorfine11• 14 days ago

how much the authors now understand their project

I don't think this is a value anymore for them.

tomkarho• 14 days ago

The way this trend is going we might need "rewritten in Rust" catalog similar to Google's graveyard.

khurs2• 14 days ago

Bun was acquired by Anthropic in December 2025

Great for the Bun creators, but now we will have major runtimes that are optimised to work with one companies models...

matklad2• 14 days ago

To add more context around lifetime errors and TigerBeetle's particular style guide:

Many projects opt to answer these kinds of questions through a style guide. TigerBeetle's TigerStyle is an example in Zig and Google's 31,000 word C++ style guide is another. The challenge with style guides is enforcement.

TigerStyle[1] is a bit more than just a style guide. The key rule for this discussion, uplifted straight from of NASA[2], is *static memory allocation*: all memory is allocated in the startup phase, and there's absolutely zero `alloc`s afterwrads . This plus crash only[3] design means that we never call `free`.

This rule is self-enforcing and compositional, in Zig. There's no global memory allocator, so the code after startup simply hasn't the API to allocate. You can't circumvent this by accident. Of course, if the programmer is byzantine, they can stuff allocator in the global, or just directly `mmap` and `unmap` pages of memory, but, at our scale, we don't have problems with that. This is a similar in kind (not degree) to Rust, where untrusted code generally can circumvent safety guarantees, even without literally spelling `unsafe`.

And, naturally, never `free`ing goes a long way towards solving many memory errors by construction. Empirically, they just haven't been a problem for TigerBeetle. It's hard to untangle contribution of static allocation in particular from everything else we are doing, but it would make sense for it to play a leading role.

(As a footnote, we aren't actually do static allocation to avoid memory errors, we use it as a linter to check that every quantity has a known _logical_ static limit, the main property we care about)

[1] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI...

[2] https://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/P10.pdf

[3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos03/tech/full_paper...

jrpelkonen• 14 days ago

By all accounts, TigerBeetle has been a tremendous success, congratulations! My understanding is that it has a deliberately fixed scope, which makes me wonder: how applicable would TigerStyle be in more general-purpose applications? If the system needs to, say, ingest arbitrary JSON documents ranging from 100 bytes to 100 GB, how would TigerStyle fare?

cb22• 14 days ago

What matklad said as a footnote deserves a little more attention!

A huge benefit is having to think and be explicit about the limits up front. To take your example of arbitrary sized JSON and flip it around: how would you do it normally?

Maybe, you'd allocate a buffer to hold your entire object when it comes in - but now you'll end up crashing when you get a large document that exceeds your available memory.

Maybe you can do things in a fixed amount of memory, using streaming or chunking - which would be pretty simple to turn to static allocation!

Static allocation forces understanding of those limits upfront.

matklad2• 14 days ago

Some thoughts on this here: https://matklad.github.io/2025/12/23/static-allocation-compi...

vrtcn• 14 days ago

I am a bit suspicious about the choice of startup time as the metric to evaluate performance in Claude Code. With a rewrite from a language like Zig to Rust, my biggest performance concern would be allocation. Where a Zig app might use a fast linear or buddy allocator, a Rust app is more likely to use malloc. During startup, both versions are likely to make tons of allocations. In fact, the Zig version is likely to make larger allocations during startup to reserve memory for its custom allocators. So I would expect both versions to be roughly on par, or Zig slightly worse there. However, during normal execution, I would expect the Zig version to be potentially faster, because it has paid the cost of malloc at startup and now an allocation might be as fast as incrementing an integer. This is speculation, but I would like to see performance numbers for the rest of the app lifecycle.

anentropic• 14 days ago

Those were in the article https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust#2-5-faster

egorfine11• 14 days ago

To me this whole saga stands on a very thin overlapping region between "it has merit" and "I hate it". Like, the blog post clearly explains the merits and they are strong. At the same time, I absolutely hate how the author handled the whole rewrite, including throwing the whole community out the window along with all their contributions and human love.

egorfine11• 14 days ago

Any chance for 1.3.15 with top bugfixes for those of us who once trusted Bun and are stuck on it in production? I have migrated almost everything out of Bun by this point but I have one single project that builds into executables with Bun and relies heavily on Bun's SQLite.

waysa• 14 days ago

I tried Bun for a weekend around Christmas 2024. I quickly hit a bug that would freeze the runtime (issue #13237) when piping a stream into a file. I found that this had been open since August 2024, scrapped the experiment and moved on. The issue is open to this day. If the GitHub comments can be trusted, this behavior even carries over to the Rust port.

awson• 14 days ago

I just glanced at it, but in "Rust supports cross-language link-time optimization between C/C++ and Rust" it's not Rust but LLVM.

Any languages with LLVM backends get cross-language LTO for free.

Have they ever tried Zig Bun with LTO?

dwdz• 14 days ago

"The blog post is expertly written. It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article."

-- Andrew Kelley

https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

jjice2• 14 days ago

Without accusing anyone of anything, I do think that this coming from the head of Zig, who gets a lot of negative publicity from the Bun rewrite (unjustifiably, it's a wonderful language) makes it harder for me to take this without wondering if there's some animosity that's really the main complaint.

Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred

The author says two things that really popped out to me that you could say are "professional" and not "personal" criticisms, but I think they're still rude and contrast this statement.

Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience

Now, both of these may be true. I don't have any evidence though, so I don't know how to take it.

All this to say, I'll take both of these posts without a ton of salt when it comes to the non-technical parts.

xyzsparetimexyz2• 14 days ago

I asked Claude to loop the workflow on all 1,448 .zig files, and about 2 minutes in, one Claude ran git stash before committing. Another ran git stash pop. And then git reset HEAD --hard. They were stepping on each other!

I hate how easy git makes it for llms to catastrophically fuck up repos

And if I put each Claude into a separate worktree, I would run out of disk space because Bun's git repository is too big and eventually the changes will need to be compiled and seen together.

This seems like a stupidly easy problem to fix.

So, I asked Claude to edit the workflow to instruct Claude to never run git stash or git reset or any git command that doesn't commit a specific file at once. No cargo either. No slow commands at all.

What's the right way to fix this? I have a Pi extension that blocks any use of the word 'git' with 'stash/checkout/reset/restore' in commands which is a very large hammer approach. Is there a way I can allow a subset of git use in a nicer way without the less nice commands?

rockmeamedee• 14 days ago

For Bun to not have torched its reputation among its users, it would have had to publish this blog post _before_ pressing merge on that PR.

That's what underlies most of the vitriolic reaction to the events, it was done really in a really rash way.

All they had to do was a)not gaslight people about your intentions when they found the branch b)publicly post the intent to do this, and then c)publish a doc like this one right before merging, ideally leaving the branch open for like a week in case anyone in the "community" finds things to fix.

Then those UB/Miri issues others found would have been "yay collaboration" boosts instead of negative issues that prove that the approach was risky/unthoughtful.

If you're going to cross a rubicon, maybe tell people a)that you actually want to do it, b)why you want to do it and c)what it looks like after you've done the rewrite.

elktown2• 14 days ago

It's depressing seeing so little critical thinking despite clear and obvious incentives (Bun now being part of Anthropic) behind the reckless decisions that's been made here. Judging by this thread a well-formed article is all that's required for lots of people to just take everything at face value since it confirms the biases of what's currently fashionable.

pohl2• 14 days ago

What specific critical thought(s) do you wish were voiced?

elktown2• 14 days ago

That this is a technological decision rather than rationalizations (e.g. fixing self-inflicted problems are now marketed as a rewrite win) that Rust is a better fit for an Anthropic-owned project.

perching_aix2• 13 days ago

I'm similarly distraught by comments like this. They are a staple, and they always fail their own standards. Critical thinking would lead me to believe that your judgement is heavily clouded, and that it is way more likely you're the one who's biased; either to find other people to be generally below you, or to find people being receptive to this effort any positively to be simply wrong. I'm even wondering if this is a stock comment of sorts.

Strong subjective judgements about an inexact but large sounding fraction of people, without any actual details, is a red flag the size of a skyscraper. And to top it all off, your conclusion is extremely convenient too: you're right, people are wrong, despite the blatant facts otherwise. Not exactly the hallmark of a particularly robust position, not for me anyways.

zamadatix6• 14 days ago

An extremely interesting blog post for me on a few fronts:

I'm very glad to see a holidtic approach to the memory errors and segfaults. I was tinkering on a static webpage just this this weekend, using Bun as the transpiler+bundler since it's so turnkey, and I ran into a few segfaults. E.g. when Bun saw I used an empty data uri for the favicon (avoids the browser trying to ask for one) it'd just crash. It reminded me of my own tinkering with Zig in its current pre-release state where it's usually a good mix of my poor memory management and working around bugs in Zig itself.

This post is also the best ad for AI I've seen yet. Not just comments saying they have 10xed themselves, a small personal project or thing which can (and likely will) be abandoned next month, or a one off dump of unusable code for the world's buggiest C compiler (come on Anthropic?). Instead this is a well thought out way of leveraging LLMs to do something which would otherwise probably not be deemed a reasonable enough effort.

I'm glad they included the rough cost as well. Crazy high, more than I can afford to be throwing at the wall to see what sticks, but still low enough to make sense over trying to hire developers for (even ignoring the timeline).

But it also highlights 2 really key things about current LLMs: the scaffolding can be just as valuable as the model & they still need someone able to figure out the right way to instruct and orchestrate them. Without the scaffolding the current models could never get close to handling something of this scale & quality. With the scaffolding you could probably get this to work okay enough even with a weaker model. On the orchestration side, Claude could help answer what good porting practices would be but it doesn't just get there itself, it requires hours of someone who understands the context of the project from bottom up and a clear understanding of what will/won't work to get the right scaffolding to do the job well.

Finally, it was an interesting dichotomy on presenting the port. On one hand it has been a bit opaque up until now. People saw the repo and there were some comments about testing the waters but then it suddenly shipped into production. On one hand that's awesome and I'm sure the reception here would be very different if there wasn't the "it's already been boringly shipped in Claude Code" shining result. On the other... I think I'll stick to using Bun as a personal tinkering tool for now. The velocity is so high I'm just not sure it'll land in a place I can rely on it st the speed of my org. Of course, that velocity is what has made Bun's success story and they should probably continue with it - I'm just looking forward to an LTS release :).

emilfihlman• 14 days ago

Until this bug is fixed, there's no trusting Bun

This is also not a memory issue but an actual logic issue, so Rust doesn't help there.

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/14144

QuadmasterXLII2• 14 days ago

Putting on my machine learning PhD student hat, the way to do this was to leave 10% of the tests out as a ‘test’ set and then once the port was done, bring them back in and find out how good the port is. The port may genuinely be good but because they spent 100k of compute hill climbing the whole test suite, “the test suite passes” now provides far less evidence that the port is good. Its weird that at Anthropic, a very ML phd company, no one pointed this out.

StriverGuy• 14 days ago

Huh? This approach makes sense for non-deterministic problems. Not engineering problems that have deterministic end results.

QuadmasterXLII2• 13 days ago

I’d want to estimate P(a random test passes) where the existing suite of tests is taken to be sampled from a distribution.

geraneum2• 13 days ago

non-deterministic problems

I'm guessing you mean probabilistic? Nevertheless, you have an indeterministic variable here which is what the LLM generates.

AbuAssar• 14 days ago

It took TypeScript team 1 year to port the code to Go, but if Claude Fable was available back then, would they better use it to port the code in 1 week instead?

padjo2• 14 days ago

It's very odd how quickly people fall back on emotional claims to attack this. Like we're engineers, if you can point at concrete problems with this rewrite I'd love to hear them. Obviously Jared is going to give the positive case, saying that he's doing that doesn't prove the rewrite is a bad idea. You need to point at objective problems, not your vague sense of unease. As it stands, by all available measures, this appears to have been a massive success, which is absolutely remarkable.

afry1• 14 days ago

Technology does not exist in a vacuum, nor does anything that is engineered. It's not this abstract stuff detached from the world.

PEOPLE make stuff, people use stuff, and people are ultimately the ones who are going to pick and choose which stuff gets made, used, adapted, enhanced, and carried into the future.

AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.

Assessed from the perspective of "technology in a vacuum", of course. it's a success. He did the thing that transformed the thing from one kind of stuff to another kind of stuff. It still does all the things it did before, and in many cases with better stats than it did before.

Assessed from the human angle, and especially the angle of Bun as a community, I would bet money that this rewrite -- executed by nobody for nobody, built and maintained by machines, maintainable only by machines -- has killed the entire project.

Maintainable only by machines, because anybody with any knowledge, experience, or investment into Bun as a platform, or who contributed patches themselves, or whoever had a question about how it works and went "Hmm, I'm gonna go into the codebase and take a look at how that happens", they all got slapped in the face and summarily kicked out of the tent with the rewrite.

Ygg22• 14 days ago

AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.

Not really. LLMs are a tool, and they do possess some interesting properties, but they are, in essence, a very surprising auto-complete.

No, what sucks is the AI companies marketing them as if they are The Holy Grail. And people are assuming that somehow LLM -> AGI -> ASI, even though there isn't really a causal link to be had, and acting like it's The Singularity.

I don't blame autocomplete for fucking up RAM, labor and god knows what else. I blame the idiots (at OpenAI and Anthropic) buying all RAM stocks and pretending this shit is any way good for anyone.

N1H1L• 13 days ago

AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.

This is a very weird issue to be mad about, and can be extended to multiple technologies - if you think about it, from computers to cellphones.

lunar_mycroft2• 14 days ago

There were/are absolutely plenty of real problems with the resulting code pointed out. Running Miri trivially found soundness issues, `SAFETY` comments that demonstrate that the model in question fundamentally doesn't understand/simulate understanding how unsafe rust works [0], etc.

[0] https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/fc865b398e51de8a95ddde4b...

insanitybit13• 13 days ago

These seem really easy to address. Any SAFETY comment that relies on the caller is something you can trivially find and fix.

bluGill• 13 days ago

We also need to ask if the better is because of Rust, or just because the old was a mess and the language was good otherwise.

padjo2• 13 days ago

I don't think "better" really had to be proved. The same but aligned with your org strategy is perfectly acceptable given these sorts of technology choices are often driven by exogenous and wooly factors like licensing, your confidence in the future direction of the technology, or the ability to hire staff (or the ability for LLMs to work with the technology!)

endospore12• 13 days ago

Well the rewrite has newly introduced many immediate and critical safety (as in Rust sense) problems. It's clear and obvious if you read the code knowing the basic rules of unsafe Rust. And don't be surprised if it doesn't appear as obvious to you or Jarred or Claude, because not knowing they don't know is the exact reason why they failed at it.

And for the emotional aspect. I'm working as an R&D engineer and one of my recently assigned experiments is to evaluate replacing workers with LLMs, quality software with slops. Every bit of exaggeration they make is making my coworkers lose jobs and I'll be no exception. The entirety of me consists of reasons going against this kind of marketing compaign.

mghackerlady• 14 days ago

This makes me sad :( I've always really liked Zig, and Bun was pretty much the only big thing I could point at and say "that was done in Zig"

erichocean3• 14 days ago

TigerBeetle has you covered then.

jmcqk6• 13 days ago

ghostty is a zig project too!

yoav• 13 days ago

Electrobun is still zig and doubling down on it

pron3• 14 days ago

Sounds to me like his choice of Zig was made in haste, as was his choice of Rust. If you find yourself changing a project's primary language more than once a decade (more like 15 years, but let's say a decade), the problem isn't the language but your technical decision process, and that's what you should look into first.

Some of the world's more important software - from browsers to the JVM - mix high-level languages with a GC and low-level languages, and it works not because of a style guide (even though one may exist). As someone working on the HotSpot JVM, I can say that it's done with a lot of thinking about constructing the right primitives that make this work well. Zig doesn't lack the features to construct the mechanisms required for getting good results in that domain, and Rust doesn't have features that could save you the thinking about such mechanisms.

pron3• 13 days ago

I should add that in the 30 years I've been a professional software developer, I've worked on and advised many projects. They all ran into serious challenges at one point or another. Not of those projects that was held in high technical regard changed their language (except for things like JS -> TS or when the project planned to change languages, starting with one suitable for prototyping and expecting to switch if and when their workload grew).

All the ones that opted to switch language after less than a decade were those with serious shortcomings in their technical decision process, and those problems, unsurprisingly, persisted after the language change. After all, the very decision to switch so soon is an admittance that they'd made a very serious misjudgment, but these projects never properly debrief why they'd made such a big mistake and how they can avoid making one again.

kanwisher• 12 days ago

likely you never were on a project that had tens of millions of users, you hit different classes of problems and you have to scale to new runtime or language often

insanitybit13• 14 days ago

This is just a hit piece and it's embarrassing to post it on your project's website. Could've been a tweet.

dzonga• 14 days ago

use Node or Deno.

if you want superior developer experience - Deno.

if you want stability over everything - Node.

low_tech_punk• 14 days ago

(1) The original zig code was probably heavily AI coded with lower quality, hence the bag. There is a chance that a full rewrite in zig might do as well but we will never find out.

(2) The rewrite itself is a massively successful marketing move. It shows what Claude code can do and how little it costs compared to human engineering. But the question remains whether someone else, not knowing zig, rust, and TypeScript can pull this off.

tipiirai• 13 days ago

This post was clearly an important marketing effort from Anthropic and Jarred. Those interactive demos alone would take serious effort from a seasoned frontend engineer, AI-assisted or not. Pretty sure multiple devs were working on this post.

dirkc• 13 days ago

I got curious and had a look at some of the code (>1m .rs). I was surprised to see code for a S3 client in there?

I clearly don't get the value proposition of bun? And even if I accept that you want to bundle your run time, package manager, test runner and bundler, why do you want to include things like a custom S3 client?

Rewriting Bun in Rust

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