Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

https://raymyers.org/post/zed-creator-calls-spade-a-spade/

by crowdhailer • 10 days ago

1550 732 10 days ago

LAC-Tech• 10 days ago

Agreed. The outrage around what Andrew said was performative and melodramatic. I remember the "no work-life balance if you work here" thing, and then I remember Bun's CEO last year complaining he might not be able to get H1Bs anymore...

And this whole thing reeked of a publicity stunt. Show people you can use $$$ of tokens to vibe code a refactor. The headline is how great anthropic - bun's owner - is.

vlaaad• 10 days ago

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.

For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

manojlds• 10 days ago

Yeah and Bun and Zig are not competing in anyway as well. Zig blog post has been updated as well recently btw.

aaa_aaa• 10 days ago

Stating you use Codex does not add any meaningful information to the case.

wowoc• 10 days ago

I think the point of mentioning Codex was that the author of the post has no relationship with Anthropic, even as a user.

raincole3• 10 days ago

It reads as "I don't use Claude Code."

coldtea6• 10 days ago

Meant to imply he's not a Claude fanboi.

drd0rk• 10 days ago

I'm using Arch Linux btw

vanderZwan• 10 days ago

Anthropic is not in the programming language market

Arguing that a product that sells itself as improving programmer productivity by writing the code for you has no stakes in "the programming language market" because it doesn't sell a programming language of its own is impressively shortsighted. Especially when the leader of a programming language has openly stated their dislike of vibecoding, critisized the industry, and the language project itself rejects PRs made with the product being sold.

raincole3• 10 days ago

Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.

ModernMech6• 10 days ago

It’s not weird considering what we’ve learned through this: the Zig project is driven by people with fragile emotions and egos who lash out at people personally when they feel threatened.

We’d like Zig to be a project with steady and technically driven leadership like Rust, but Kelley has made clear (many times) it’s more of an egoistic vanity project like Elm, designed to cater to the emotional needs of the BDFL.

jraph9• 10 days ago

But that hit piece would be an answer to the (multi-billion dollar) studio saying how much better the result is after the rewrite to Unreal, except it's not because Unreal is better (which it could be btw, or not, or more probably it depends on the use case), it's because the studio worked hard to make it look better, which they could have done without the rewrite.

Anthropic does this to sell LLM rewrites and make them look better than they actually are, Zig being the source language, they are a collateral victim of that misleading advertisement. Of course it's unfair to them and of course they should highlight this.

rob74• 10 days ago

Well, if your game would be one of very few AAA games written in Unity (actually, the only game written in Unity people reasonably familiar with the subject would be able to name off the top of their heads), things might look different...

khuey• 10 days ago

If Unity had 2.5 users anyone had heard of before the switch you can see where the motivation might (at least emotionally) come from.

f-serif• 10 days ago

It is in there nature. They (specially zig creator) were so jealous about about vlang getting traction and getting $800/month donations, they made it their core mission to attack vlang and spread hate.

kqp• 9 days ago

Anthropic is massively bigger than a studio, Zig is massively smaller than Unity, and it wasn’t a quiet switch, it was a huge publicity event. It’s more like the #1 movie of the year being “The Profound Joy of Finally Leaving Unity”. Sometimes things are big enough to warrant a response.

lelanthran5• 10 days ago

Anthropic is not in the programming language market;

No, they're intentionally in all the programming language markets.

eru• 10 days ago

Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another.

Just like Google might sell ads on (approximately) all the websites, but they don't particularly care which website you visit.

bel85• 10 days ago

Yeah I don't understand these myopic takes.

Jarred's post about Bun-Zig-Rust post was technical and polite.

Andrew's post in response was anything but that.

embedding-shape4• 10 days ago

I'm starting to think that a way we can easily filter what's being heavily composed by (SOTA/mainstream) LLMs or not is by how "polite" the public sees their published blog post.

If everyone sees the post as "polite", most of it probably been written by LLMs, as they remove anything that could be seen as "nonpolite" and human. Meanwhile, engineers who just want to publish their own thoughts and feelings on a subject, will be filled with stuff the public sees as "nonpolite", and since those hard edges weren't trimmed before the publishing, we can then assume this is actually a genuine person's thoughts and feelings.

jraph9• 10 days ago

Polite but misleading in a way that makes zig look bad. So of course the response is sour.

nozzlegear3• 9 days ago

IMO if Jarred wasn't literally working for Anthropic and using their tools to do the rewrite, the whole thing would've been much more well received. Imagine if he'd used Sol to do it (while working for Anthropic – impossible of course), or GLM 5.2, etc.

Instead, since he does work for Anthropic, it just looks like a big marketing gimmick that was going to be done whether it was the right thing to do or not.

cute_boi• 9 days ago

Yea, but he was the one who started Twitter war on Zig. He framed Zig is bad because zig wouldn't accept my slop PR etc...

audunw• 10 days ago

The results improving the end user experience didn’t have much to do with the rewrite. Improvements in binary size and speed could be had with similar efforts on the Zig codebase. They spent extra effort to get those metrics to look good to sell the rewrite.

The memory safety aspects could be discussed. Arguably they could have had equally good memory safety by employing AI, tests and fuzzing (the Zig integrated fuzzer that the Zig team suggested they use, not just the high level fuzzing they were doing)

For this kind of project I do think using Rust is a good idea. At the very least because a project like Bun probably can benefit from a more mature language.

But I also think Andrew’s perspective of this process has been essential to understand what happened here, and though he could have been nicer with his word selection in a couple of places (he doesn’t have the clout of Linus Torvalds to get away with it), what he wrote absolutely needed to be said. I find it annoying that people dismiss it as personal attacks. If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks. It’s essential context for understanding what happened.

ModernMech6• 10 days ago

If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks.

The post did no such thing — it spread rumors and leaned into gossip. There’s no proof or evidence or examples whatsoever offered by Kelley except Jarred’s own public words, which means the post didn’t reveal or expose anything about his management.

pizza234• 10 days ago

Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users

Anthropic absolutely is in the programming language market. If/since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy, a success story will tie the given language(s) to the given AI company.

Rust may have a tremendous success in the future, because it's much easier to write it with AI (ignoring for a moment whether that's really a good thing). The implication is that Anthropic has a stake in Rust's success.

Also, to be kept in mind that devs advertising successfull rewrites often hide some aspects that are unfavorable to the narrative; typically, how bad was the code before the rewrite), although there are other (significant) aspects that have been omitted.

Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.

I take you haven't read Andrew Kelley's article (here: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...).

Summary:

- Jarred has written Bun with very bad engineering standards

- Jarred has managed public relations very poorly (e.g. ghosting the Zig foundation)

- When they rewrote the project to Rust, and described Zig as poor choice, there has been a negative fallout for Zig

- The ZSF is obviously upset because of the poor publicity

This is summarized at the end of the post:

Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator. Such people might reasonably worry that might happen to them

As a matter of fact, I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post. This is undeserved though, and that's what Kelley explains.

There's definitely a personal attack somewhat, and this is addressed in the last (added later) section.

preommr• 10 days ago

I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post.

This doesn't even make any sense. The part that you're quoting[0], is Andrew commenting on the fallout from the blog post he made. How could you have thought something about a blog post that hadn't come out yet?

Also, if you are talkinga bout the post Jarred made, it was extremely charitable about zig: "Zig made Bun possible. I would never have been able to build this much in 1 year if it wasn't for Zig."

[0] "The other critical mistake I made with this post was failing to consider the rather obvious and important point that this might affect Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator."

cheikhcheikh• 10 days ago

We've read the andrew blog. It is a personal attack a very petty one, you're clearly a biased fan of his and of zig probably if you cannot see the obvious, but we're telling you as outsiders how poorly it reflects on andrew and the future of zig, and this is coming from someone who originally had a very good opinion of zig and andrew, now not so much. You can choose to ignore that and engage in the massive circlejerk zig fans are engaging in during this or maybe take a second and reconsider

NewsaHackO• 9 days ago

Jarred has managed public relations very poorly (e.g. ghosting the Zig foundation)

I actually love the use of ghosting in this post. It is almost a Freudian slip about how Zig looks like from the view of outsiders. Zig moves exactly like how toxic exes do. They point fingers, make passive-aggressive statements, unnecessarily air out dirty laundry, and downplay all of the good their partner has done during the relationship.

dcre4• 9 days ago

since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy

This premise makes no sense. AI makes rewrites to any language easy.

worrycue• 9 days ago

Rust may have a tremendous success in the future, because it's much easier to write it with AI (ignoring for a moment whether that's really a good thing).

It’s interesting that Rust could become the most deployed but the least written (by humans) programming language if the dreams of AI bros come true.

If AI gets good enough to competently translate other languages to Rust then there is no point writing in Rust (a language with a steep learning curve and is high friction in use), you can just write in a low friction language like C, C++, Odin, Zig, … etc. and have AI translate it to Rust catching all the memory bugs in the process.

budsniffer9525• 9 days ago

Jarred has written Bun with very bad engineering standards

"You're holding it wrong."

Jarred has managed public relations very poorly (e.g. ghosting the Zig foundation)

What obligation do you think he has here? Which direction should these good relations flow?

I'm also an outsider here, and reading this post was kind of shocking. Can't believe someone would attack your open source code. It's everything normies hate about ornery IT people.

maleldil3• 9 days ago

I take you haven't read Andrew Kelley's article

Yes, that's the sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.

ksec5• 9 days ago

- When they rewrote the project to Rust, and described Zig as poor choice, there has been a negative fallout for Zig

- The ZSF is obviously upset because of the poor publicity

No where did they describe zig as poor choice, and there were zero evidence ZSF was getting poor publicity.

Had whole of HN, Reddit and Twitter all laughing at Zig this would have make more sense. But that was not the case. As a matter of fact I don't even record a single comment about it. If anything a lot of these "poor publicity" and "Zig as poor choice" were completely fabricated.

Had the internet turned against Zig, the response may have deserve a lot more weight.

lelanthran5• 10 days ago

Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.

Not sure; it has some elements of personal issues, but they're followed by a rationale from the author.

Honestly, seeing the project lead (Andrew Kelly) take a stand against poor engineering practices without any equivocation makes me more inclined to want to use Zig - their values (in this regard, at least) align with mine.

He also substantiates what many of us are saying to all these "Very Senior Chief Engineer with 40 years experience" who are boasting of 10x productivity: these people aren't reading the code they are generating, and were producing slop even without AI.

shevy-java2• 10 days ago

You mean Anthropic has no agenda on its own? That seems a very biased analysis here. The response by Zig could be flawed (speculation, I have not reached this conclusion yet) but I don't see how this offsets Anthropic wanting to promote its AI slop here in any way, shape or form.

athrowaway3z• 10 days ago

I'm a heavy Rust user who doesn't like Zig all that much.

I browsed through the Bun code following Kelly's post, and decided to have Codex replace all my Bun usage with Deno.

cognitiveinline3• 10 days ago

Care to given an example of the egregious code that led to such a drastic personal shift?

postepowanieadm• 10 days ago

Did you use any specific tools, like ast-grep, or did it manual way?

whizzter3• 10 days ago

It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen.

What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lot of craftsmanship, the performance benefits outdid and kept the latter languages relevant for a long while.

Still, the performance/predictability penalty didn't give way so Rust (and Swift) came into play. They don't have as many unpredictable performance characteristics as the previously "safe" GC languages but still provided more or less the same guarantees (in some ways perhaps even better for Rust).

The brilliance of the Rust ideas did start a bit of a cambrian explosion of languages in that niche, most of them however targeting a bit more of a craftsman position than Rust (that came out of distinct industry needs).

The problem as the article illustrates, in car terms.

If Java,JS,etc are mostly "regular safe cars" and C/C++ a two wheel motorcycle.

Rust is perhaps a rally car (fast but still a car so occupants inside are well protected) whilst Zig really is a quadbike or open wheel cart, not as unsafe as a two wheel bike since you won't slide for the smallest oil/ice patch but flipping over is still dangerous as hell.

And that takes us to the crux, so many developers who love the craft and perfection (and don't live under- or perhaps care of- financial constraints) think that "good careful" developers is all that's needed and don't see dangerous language designs as a problem.

I'm an older developer, and given that I can write "good careful code", but 90% of the time it's also a matter of time and financial constraints so I wouldn't trust mine (or anyone elses for that matter) code written under those "industry" conditions.

I think Zig has a lot of nice perks, but it was obvious from day 1 that it's very much for people that love their hacking freedom over writing code for todays hostile world.

Zecc• 9 days ago

That was a pretty good car analogy. Thank you.

Edit to add: I'm unsure where assembly would sit in this analogy. Skateboard? Monocycle? Perhaps ice skates.

Gigachad• 9 days ago

All I’ve seen is there is literally no programmer smart and careful enough to never create a use after free or out of bounds read in a sufficiently complex codebase.

The state of computer security has moved on from the old model of just patching bugs when you find them. To now where we need to systematically prevent them from happening to begin with.

skydhash3• 9 days ago

I trust myself to write good code, but I’ve been under pressure to rush things and extra features in Java, C#, TypeScript are really great on those occasions. I love C and Perl, but as you say, there’s not a lot of safety harness. A lot of trust is required for those in a team.

Shorel4• 9 days ago

Where is D-lang in your car analogy? Would it be a Ferrari? :)

simondotau• 10 days ago

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts?

Anthropic's posts were sanctimonious, self-serving, tone-concealed delegitimisation of Zig. Kelly's post was a strategically poor but sincere individual understandably frustrated at this concealed attack, expressing his honest feelings about the situation.

torginus2• 9 days ago

Andrew Kelley mentioned that the rewrite did bring technical improvements, however those were not tied to Rust and could've been made in the Zig codebase.

Thanemate2• 9 days ago

The moment technical decisions are influenced by LLM compatibility and LLM performance, they basically are.

Remember the days where teams would adopt technologies based on how familiar the members are with them? "Now that the AI is here" and is the one writing code, to the point where Linkedin devs flex how it's been months since they touched source code, teams adopt technologies based on how familiar AI is with them.

afavour5• 9 days ago

Anthropic is not in the programming language market;

Did we just read the same blog post? I see no assertion in it that Anthropic is in the programming language market, rather that this rewrite was a marketing opportunity for them they were happy to lean into.

For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

The latter part of the post is much less about Anthropic and more about AI coding in general so I’d say it’s still very relevant to your interests.

nozzlegear3• 9 days ago

Anthropic is not in the programming language market;

The article by Ray Myers makes the case that Anthropic is in the programming language market by way of them having a clear monetary stake in making their agents look supremely capable of all tasks, up to and including rewriting an entire Zig codebase to Rust.

From TFA:

Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering. They need you to believe they can do that. Well, maybe it’s not you that they need to convince. Maybe it’s your C-Suite, various world leaders, or the manager of your retirement fund. They’ve raised $132 billion in investment, and are approaching an IPO valued over $1 trillion. Since they cannot show profitability, this depends on selling their hypothetical future impact.
In literary terms, Anthropic is an unreliable narrator.
One of their key narratives is: Coding is going away, then the rest of software engineering, and eventually most other human labor. This kind of money behind this kind of story has an impact, regardless of how true we think the story is.

embedding-shape4• 10 days ago

Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products.

Yeah, don't discount how powerful "marketing" is to management/executives, and also don't discount how absolutely ridiculously petty people can be, especially people who end up like CEOs and similar, requires a particular person. I can definitively see reason #1 and #3 from that to basically already set in stone that Bun had to be rewritten in Rust.

dcre4• 9 days ago

I don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all. It seems much more plausible to me that Jarred just does what he wants. He has said as much.

sufficientsoup• 9 days ago

Why take what he said at face value after "Calm down; this is just an experiment... but actually I'm gonna merge this huge thing in a week"?

shimman2• 9 days ago

Devs need to start realize how people in power take advantage of them. If you already have a bright starry-eyed Peter Thiel acolyte, it's not hard to see how they can be taken advantage of. Especially when it's a multibillion dollar company that stands to give you literally multigenerational defining amount of wealth.

They hired them because they already agreed with them. Reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote during an interview:

Marr: “How can you know I’m self-censoring?”
Chomsky: “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

FridgeSeal• 9 days ago

don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all

Because it’s marketing gold? Any marketer worth their salt would be super keen to get their claws into a project like this.

Anthropic and friends are in then business of selling LLM’s. This is a demonstration of LLM capability, they’d be foolish to not even try to cash in on it.

runtime_lens• 10 days ago

I think two things can be true at once....It was obviously a great marketing story for anthropic but that doesn't automatically mean that engineering work had no value. Companies have always turned interesting technical projects into marketing.

jonplackett2• 10 days ago

The thing is - is it a self fulfilling prophecy?

We already know junior hiring an are down. And how many people are now excited to learn to code compared to 5years ago?

How many of those excited people are ACTUALLY learning to code and not just learning to prompt?

LLMs/agents will take over (or at least dominate) software dev even if they don’t get any better because humans will just get old and there’ll be no new humans who know how to do it.

piokoch2• 9 days ago

Well, I see LLM coding capabilities as a great enabler for people who have some codeing-like skills or needs, but were not sufficiently skilled to do something more complicated. Think of people who are good at Excel, who use statistical tools like SAS, SPSS, other analytical software. Now they can ask LLM to create a Pandas/SAS lang script and do much more advanced stuff.

People who were in the marketing data analysis (like sentiment analysis) - 5 minutes and they have a code that uses Hugging Face model suited for sentiment analysis, zero-shot classification, etc. No need to pay for expensive online services or expensive NLP software. It's here for free or $20 a month.

Still, it does not mean you will be able to code database engine with LLM, application server, rewrite Django in Rust, etc. So software engineers still will be needed to do ambitious, complicated stuff.

So, I kind of see it backwards, real skills, like knowing algorithms, understanding performance (including hardware stuff like processor caches, etc.) will become needed, as other, simpler jobs that needed only a "coding monkey" will be gone.

We no longer need to dig ditches manually, we have machines for that, but the purpose of the ditches is still planned by man.

jonplackett2• 9 days ago

If you push that ditch analogy though. Yeah we no longer dig ditches manually - but we also then all got overweight and weak because people aren’t doing any physical labour anymore. (Most people anyway)

And diggers absolutely do have a monopoly on digging ditches now.

I don’t see how someone learning to code now will ever be as good at coding as someone who learned before LLMs.

Just like right now no-one is gonna get better at digging ditches than people were before diggers - it just doesn’t make sense for someone to put the time and effort into that.

daedrdev• 9 days ago

This is quite true. Also, there is no project you can make as a junior to demonstrate your unassisted competence because 10 other people used AI for a similar project

self_awareness3• 10 days ago

Yeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself.

The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C?

C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on.

Rust was designed to answer this exact problem (among a few others of course).

So the argument "your code is fscking sheet" is very 1990's. In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.

lelanthran5• 10 days ago

The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code.
In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.

Rust doesn't provide either of those guarantees.

If I were to rephrase your sentiment for accuracy: Rust disallows certain coding patterns. Certain classes of bugs can only appear in those coding patterns.

IOW, Rust disallows $FOO which is a superset of "specific class of errors". This means that while Rust prevents specific bugs, as a side-effect it will also prevent some correct code.

self_awareness3• 10 days ago

Very true. Rust prevents some good code as well.

Also it doesn't guarantee that the code is always 100% correct.

But I think this is the correct direction of programming language evolution.

prollings• 10 days ago

Rust requires discipline too. I can go around using Arc, Rc and .clone() everywhere without upsetting the borrow checker, I can use let mut a bunch and pretend if, match, etc. aren't expressions. This results in worse code, and Rust didn't stop me.

The borrow checker prevents a set of errors from being possible, but it doesn't prevent bad code from being written.

self_awareness3• 10 days ago

It would be easier for you to argument that the user is expected to have discipline to NOT use "unsafe" keyword in all functions.

Because a lot of mechanisms actually still have guards in runtime. And using .clone() on Rc/Arc is actually the idiomatic/preferred way of evading the borrow checker if we can't design the data structure in a different way.

It's a big difference between cases when you need to spend brain energy to find ways to "out-smart" the compiler, and spend brain energy to "fit into the proper set of assumptions" of a programming language.

Jtarii• 10 days ago

Most bugs are logic bugs which rust does nothing to help you with.

kawogi2• 10 days ago

In my experience, it absolutely does (at least if you use it idiomatically). Using the type system (esp. enums, Result and newtypes) makes a good bunch of invalid states irrepresentable.

This also helps to focus on the remaining things that could go wrong.

The integration of unit tests also lowers the barrier to just sprinkle some tests in, if you're unsure that you got an edge case right. Anf clippy (not stricly the language, but still kind of a core component) greaty helps to stay on the idiomatic track.

No silver bullet of course, but I never had so few runtime issues with any other programming language so far.

What logic bugs did you encounter the most?

edit: mobile typos

JuniperMesos3• 10 days ago

I disagree; Rust's type system, which supports pretty rich algebraic data types, makes it easier to specify the correct data model for your system than it would be in languages with simpler type systems like C or Python. The ability to define enum types with arbitrary shapes for each variant, and then match on them in code, allows programmers to build better, more-accurate abstractions and have less fear of screwing up and causing a logic bug.

chlorion• 9 days ago

Rusts memory safety is enforced via type safety. You can enforce more than just memory safety related invariants with the same type system?

I've seen many people make this claim and it's wrong but also silly. How do you think type systems work?

nextaccountic• 9 days ago

The borrow checker is a good tool (and it makes Rust objectively better than Zig to me), but it unfortunately doesn't prevent writing bad code

An issue with Bun is that it interfaces with a C++ JS engine and it needs unsafe. In this case, the best practice is to write a safe binding to encapsulate this external dependency (that's why in Rust we have -sys crates with raw unsafe bindings, and other crates with a safe interface on top), and then write your business logic entirely in safe Rust

However, the Rust port of Bun didn't follow such best practices (perhaps with good SDD practices it could, not sure about that). The resulting code has literally thousands of unsafe blocks. It also contains plenty of UB. The port already costed hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's unclear if Mythos/Fable is able to refactor it further to remove unsafe usage without introducing further UB, and how much it will cost

(here It's important to note something. Rust UB is in some abstract sense harder to deal with than C or Zig UB, because it also needs to uphold the guarantees of safe Rust. If you get to write your business logic in safe Rust that's a good deal, but the price of that is that your unsafe code has extra responsibilities)

DanielHB• 9 days ago

Static memory safety is a spectrum and so is code quality.

how is that different from C?

Zig gives you far more memory and type safety than C and without a borrow checker and a complex generics system.

Zig also allows optional runtime checks (at the cost of runtime performance).

There is no better language between Rust and Zig because they have different tradeoffs that are better or worse in different scenarios. It is more like Rust vs C++ and Zig vs C.

throwa356262• 10 days ago

I think Anthropic is putting too much time and energy into marketing (and politics) while competitors are catching up on the engineering side.

But what do I know, maybe your CTO bought this and now wants to fire half of the dev team and use Claude to convert your COBOL codebase to Rust...

simjnd6• 10 days ago

Thank you. I was left confused after people praised the Bun to Rust blog post eventhough it contained very actual technical substance. No clear evaluation of options, very biased report on impact, missing figures. It absolutely didn't feel like an engineering blog post.

Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointing from a technical standpoint.

cognitiveinline3• 10 days ago

very actual technical substance

Did we read the same article? I mean it wasn't talking about a specific line of code, but it had deep architecture details, rational for memory safety and bugs, agentic coding patterns for scale. It was full of substance, multiple times.

simjnd6• 9 days ago

I could point to the same examples this article refers to: the Bun blog post says "Having a rigid style guide [in Zig] with clear ownership expectations explicitly spelled out in the type system was a real option for Bun" and presents no technical reason why they didn't choose (or even TRY) that. They handwave it with "This is and ergonomic than the Zig we expect".

Why was it in their own words a real option? And why did they not go for it? This is the technical substance I'm looking for: an engineer explaining what options have been considered and what wanted and unwanted tradeoffs they present.

Also only mentioning figures for the platforms that saw an improvement is sketchy. "With ICU and code folding Windows and Linux get 20% smaller", what about macOS? Why did it not see the same gains? The fact that they don't mention it makes me think that they don't KNOW, and isn't confidence inspiring coming from the engineer who SHOULD know.

sajithdilshan3• 10 days ago

I really don't understand what's the big deal here. Anthropic converted Bun from Zig to Rust using Fable and used that for marketing, but do people blindly trust them? Also isn't Zig still unstable and from that perspective regardless of how they did it, wouldn't it make sense to migrate it to a stable language?

coldtea6• 10 days ago

but do people blindly trust them

Judging from internet posts and HN comments, many do.

sajithdilshan3• 10 days ago

Then that's their own fault. Nothing to do with Anthropic, it could have been any other company putting out marketing material and people blindly trust them.

ksec5• 9 days ago

Judging from internet posts and HN comments, many do.

Judging from the HN comments in the past on Bun's rewrite. I wouldn't even use the word "many". It was literally all Anti-AI comments and reckless engineering behaviour complain.

krupan3• 9 days ago

It's a big precisely because so many people are blindly trusting AI company marketing. It blows my mind how many people, especially here on once-subversive hacker news, are not just swallowing the marketing but they are doing the marketing for these companies for free. That's why it needs to be talked about!

virajk_313• 10 days ago

Anthropic migrated Bun from Zig to Rust, they probably tried writing it in Zig using AI and ran into issues because there isn't enough Zig training data. A year ago, most LLMs couldn' t code reliably in Rust, But were fluent in Python, C, and web tech.

sublinear4• 10 days ago

Nobody and nothing is fluent is "web tech"!

virajk_313• 10 days ago

web tech - HTML, CSS, JS, and based/derived frameworks

ashishb2• 10 days ago

Languages do matter.

And I think the only sensible backend languages when starting a new for-profit project is Python, Go, and Rust for 99% use-cases.

In other cases, third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry starts to suffer.

coldtea6• 10 days ago

Keeping it to the most mainstream, Java is a mighty fine choice as well, with even better options for third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry than most of the above.

ashishb2• 9 days ago

I think most organizations don't want to increase their Java usage.

And the reason is not technical. Technically, it is a great language.

Legally, it feels risky to most.

bel85• 10 days ago

I think Odin's batteries included approach have a chance to achieve escape velocity.

Specially if their community and their BDFL continues to be welcoming and fun to interact with.

Their 1.0 roadmap announcement is cool: https://youtu.be/dLPAqXi9In0

Here's most of the language in a single demo file: https://odin-lang.org/docs/demo/

well_ackshually2• 10 days ago

Forgetting the JVM when it provides absurdly good performance and more packages than pretty much all three of these languages combined is certainly a choice. Even Java and all its verbosity gets fixed by not having to write it manually. Kotlin is also a very viable option. Scala if you're a bit crazy.

rafterydj3• 9 days ago

Most of the people I've encountered that use Java are working on enterprise codebases that are a couple decades old at this point. And I'm totally unfamiliar, but I thought Kotlin was vaguely "Java for Android" - other than existing packages, are there other reasons to choose languages focused on the JVM?

Ampersander2• 9 days ago

Why would you need any of those listed capabilities these days? Just generate them with 100x AGI

khalic3• 10 days ago

Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering

I didn’t read further, this is just sensationalism at its crudest

coldtea6• 10 days ago

Wat?

Anthropic leadership, including CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Boris Cherny, has declared that software engineering is dead or will become obsolete within 6 to 12 months due to AI automation.

Cherny states that at Anthropic, no code is manually written anymore, with engineers using Claude Code to generate 22–27 pull requests daily and AI agents operating in autonomous loops.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackboxAI_/comments/1qxhqry/anthro...

Laurel12342• 10 days ago

What do you mean? It's literally been a significant part of their marketing.

khalic3• 10 days ago

Let’s assume their marketing argument is in good faith (it isn’t, they’re just capturing market knowing very well they won’t replace most software dev):

Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development. They make it more efficient, which could lead to less software developer.

How is this “campaigning to end software engineering”? It’s an exaggeration at best, dishonest and sensationalist at worst

brainless6• 10 days ago

"Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering" - good but are they the only ones? I do not like Anthropic after their recent locking mechanisms. I use opencode with GLM, Mimo, Qwen, and what not. I use Codex as well.

Anthropic does not need to tell me that much of software engineering is being re-written. In my opinion, the costs have crashed. I build commercial projects at 1/3rd my earlier costs. I started build everything I can in Rust and I am still doing that. My projects have only gotten more ambitious, latest being https://github.com/brainless/akar - a WIP, please don't scream at me.

Many folks have publicly said they want to keep AI agents away from their works. Good for them. I want to accelerate software engineering, something I have done passionately for 20 years, with all the agents I can use. And I make my own agents, constantly experimenting to push local llm based agents.

If engineers want to stay behind, good for them. Not everyone does. Andrew Kelly's post read like an attack, IMHO. But why care about me? I am just a farmer (https://www.instagram.com/curryhostel) who uses AI to now build ambitious software.

etdznots2• 10 days ago

I’m puzzled by how many people seem to be convinced (deluded?) into believing that their productivity has been multiplied and costs have become fractional to build things, why don’t I see any of that productivity gain or cost reduction out in the world? What has become cheaper or better engineered? If you believe posts like thsi, we should be living in a golden age of prosperity, when it seems that aside from getting better lots of products and companies seem to just be getting worse? Like seriously, to a normal person, putting aside from the benefits of using LLM’s directly for the LLM user, what things in the world have gotten better thanks to this abundance and oversupply of “intelligence” that is supposedly mutiplying people’s productivity?

brainless6• 10 days ago

A lot of those products are from big companies who seem to be struggling the most. Software does not solve bureaucracy. As an indie engineer, I have absolutely no doubt what I am doing myself.

But that change does not mean my products will become popular. That is a lot beyond software. Also, the tooling is just barely 1.5 years old and people are already asking for world-changing results. All the while totally ignoring what indies are saying.

rvz• 10 days ago

Like seriously, to a normal person, putting aside from the benefits of using LLM’s directly for the LLM user, what things in the world have gotten better thanks to this abundance and oversupply of “intelligence” that is supposedly mutiplying people’s productivity?

For the normal person, they now have more choice. To businesses it is an even more fierce competition. There is an illusion of productivity since everyone using LLMs can’t stop because their competitor is also moving faster with LLMs.

So everyone is so “productive” in “building” anything at the third of the cost, it also means that even the customers that the builders are selling to are also building their own solution themselves.

Customers turn into competitors faster and those in pure software are now making even less money. Except for companies in frontier AI, infrastructure and hardware.

witx3• 10 days ago

You have a very fitting username

brainless6• 9 days ago

I am not sure if you mean good, bad or ugly but yeah this username is perhaps with me since 1998. I used to hang around in MIT, Stanford and many other Uni IRC rooms. I was this odd username from a far away city. Tim Berners-Lee once asked me about the real person behind the username. I almost shat my pants but somehow I answered.

I am sure you have a great story for your username and the blank HN profile too.

My_Name• 10 days ago

I think I got all the information I need to be able to judge that article from seeing that the author calls themselves a "Retrofuturist Software Mender".

woodruffw19• 10 days ago

I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t.

When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.

faitswulff• 9 days ago

I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.

At least for Rust, part of this is because there is no BDFL, by design. Python has moved away from the BDFL model as well, IIRC. Individual contributors can get mad and write angry personal attacks, but there’s no face of the language like there is with Zig.

woodruffw19• 9 days ago

Yes, I think this is a good thing about Rust.

(It’s of course a tradeoff, since Rust moves more slowly than I think a lot of people would prefer.)

jraph9• 9 days ago

If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad when you leave and if you avoid ghosting the Zig foundation in scheduled meetings you had with them, I suppose you should be good.

woodruffw19• 9 days ago

I think we can quibble about the Bun post’s factual claims. But I don’t think the post was deceptive or dishonest in its claims. Like most technical writing, it represents a vantage point.

As for ghosting in meetings: sure, that seems bad. I would also be upset if someone did that to me. But you can state that factually without making it into a personal attack. It would even be more convincing.

Aurornis7• 9 days ago

If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad

What misleading stuff? Makes Zig look bad how?

The posts I read were appreciative to Zig.

The only “misleading” piece of either blog post that I recall was the Andrew Kelley claim that Bun wasn’t fuzzing, which was easily refuted by pointing to their fuzzing work.

If there’s something more then I’d like to see it, but every time I ask nobody can point to anything other specific.

Lerc5• 9 days ago

When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL.

I think it is worse than that, the comments from people in threads about this suggest that this is an attitude that is creeping into the community. They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a more welcoming community, the remainder will be more concentrated.

kalcode• 9 days ago

There seems to be a team sport mentality with AI topic in HN these days. Almost feels like people are picking sides, and thus not being very thoughtful or rational.

Sigh, there definitely an attitude creeping into the community and it's a huge turn off unfortunately.

woodruffw19• 9 days ago

I honestly hope that isn’t true. I’ve interacted with some Zig projects (and some people I’d characterize as Zig evangelists, in a positive way), and my experiences with both were very good.

gedy• 9 days ago

They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a more welcoming community

Given the context, you mean Rust? Nothing against Rust folks but I wouldn't really call it more welcoming community.

cmrdporcupine• 9 days ago

I had this exact same reaction. Agreeing with the substance of the critique of approach etc but not at all its tone nor of the underlying elitism that lays there.

This is not how professionals behave in a profession.

Decorum actually matters.

Anthropic is doing bad stuff. They clearly have a broken internal engineering culture. Hence I don't use their products. But I expect to see this laid out in a structured argumentation that doesn't go after people and their personalities.

ibejoeb3• 9 days ago

Everyone is motivated. It seems to me that Anthropic went out fishing for something to blow up. As Ray puts it: "Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products." Sounds spot on.

Others have pointed to some plausible technical benefits from the port, namely that it forces an enumeration of unsafe code boundaries. There's probably something to that, but the big idea is that Anthropic bet that its models could do a big job, and they needed to both demonstrate that and make hay of it. Everything aligned. They did the port. The artisans might call it slop, but it runs, they did it like 2 weeks, and they stuck it to the guy that shuns AI.

If you're the type of manager who picks farming out work to a body shop with 100 unskilled workers instead of hiring 2 legitimate FTEs, then this is speaking your language.

anthonypasq3• 9 days ago

none of this justifies a nasty mean spirited blog post.

mekoka2• 9 days ago

I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.

I'd be prudent to use a clear faux-pas by a BDFL as an argument to push for an alternative, seemingly more consensual, leadership style. I'd also be careful to fall for the apparent lack of overt aggression in the latter type of structures, as a necessarily positive signal. I've seen people in various such communities (including the two cited languages) that have chosen not to interact with their steering committees, because of perceived toxicity.

This can and does happen with any kind of structure and can take many shapes, some of whom are too subtle or passive to even accurately pinpoint, in the way you would for example directly index a BDFL. In The Tyranny of Structurelessness Jo Freeman made the case that the lack of a clear structure in the make up of a movement presents with opportunities for very fuzzy power dynamics and related abuses that are also much more challenging to deal with.

woodruffw19• 9 days ago

Yeah, I don’t mean to detract from the serious communication issues that other ecosystems have.

(I don’t think committee/unstructured/BDFL communities do better as a rule, it’s more about the culture that’s promulgated by whoever is at the top, regardless of how many of them there are.)

dundarious3• 9 days ago

It might be helpful to read the latest revision of Andrew's post, which may address this concern for you. It received several revisions: https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/commits/master/p...

sigmar2• 9 days ago

To me, this addendum makes it worse. Making small edits to a post like this makes it seem like you're doubling down on the original resentful points, especially with all the new justifications like "a trillion dollar company fired the first shot." Should have just deleted the blog post in its entirety imho.

outstanding relationships with essentially everyone who openly uses Zig and talks about it publicly

Essentially everyone? more blogposts incoming?

0xffff22• 9 days ago

I don't think the style of multiple revisions to walk back the most problematic parts really helps the case. It very much leaves me with the impression that the original version is the one that the author really meant, with the revisions being just a weak attempt to deflect criticism.

throw16180339• 9 days ago

That's even worse.

colinsane• 9 days ago

The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t.

my instinct is to step up and defend Andrew: to say that truly, he has strong opinions -- which is to say he _cares_ about doing things right -- but that he's more patient and accommodating than you're judging him to be from this 10,000ft view.

that's kinda weird: you might view this as a personal attack _from_ Andrew against Bun and i might view the reactions as personal attacks _against_ Andrew. viewing it through this lens without our preconceptions ought to make either both parties or neither party look bad, i think? i don't know the solution except to highlight the outsized impact that our individual preconceptions play when judging a situation from 10,000ft away.

draw_down• 9 days ago

I think it's weird to say crap like "So and so was a stinky manager" and then be like it's not a personal attack!

I liked Zed Shaw. I liked Ted Unangst. They made solid technical points and they were kinda mean about it. They didn't act like butter wouldn't melt in their mouths at the same time.

woodruffw19• 9 days ago

I want to be very clear: I don't dislike Andrew (or Jarred). Everything I've seen about him suggests that he's a bright and motivated person, and (like a lot of people, including myself) I suspect he struggles with how is tone is read online versus IRL.

I'm not judging him as a human being. I just think the post does not accomplish his goals, unless his goal really was to write a personal attack.

overgard11• 9 days ago

To me it's just highlighting the reality -- Anthropic fired the first shots. I think it's reasonable for people to say, hey, if you're going to trash the reputation of Zig (in a pretend-objective way) then it's entirely fair for people to put in important context that Bun was not written well.

woodruffw19• 9 days ago

I really struggle to find a plain, non-motivated reading of the Bun's post that could be fairly described as a "trashing." It's a very bland post.

sigmar2• 9 days ago

I think it's reasonable for people to say, hey, if you're going to trash the reputation of Zig (in a pretend-objective way)

what specifically is this referring to? Not aware of any comments from Anthropic on this topic.

ares623• 9 days ago

Andrew didn't make the hit piece out of nowhere, unprovoked.

Jared, using Anthropic's multi-billion dollar microphone, painted Zig in a bad light with their first (denied) attempt to merge a vibecoded PR to improve Zig's build times.

Then very shortly after that failed attempt, about 11 days later I gather, Jared (again with help from Anthropic's very big microphone) made public the Zig-to-Rust port.

So unless you're planning on getting acquihired by Anthropic _and_ planning on porting away from Rust using their tools very publicly, I think you'll be safe from such pieces.

rcxdude3• 9 days ago

What exactly is Anthropic's multi-billion dollar microphone here?

turtlebits• 9 days ago

I appreciate having an opinion vs a bunch of safe words saying nothing. Most CEO communication probably isn't even written by them and has a person-less touch.

It's totally fine to get a negative reaction and avoid the project. It's called having human emotions, which is actually healthy. Getting feedback is how you learn and grow as a person.

woodruffw19• 9 days ago

There’s a difference between having a negative reaction, which is a natural human thing, and talking out of both sides of your mouth. You can also have negative things to say (or just strong opinions) without being indecorous or unkind.

alloysmila• 10 days ago

I remember the uber db migration post and I can't help but wonder if the tone of these conversations would be different for bun if AI wasn't involved.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/

lelanthran5• 10 days ago

I remember the uber db migration post and I can't help but wonder if the tone of these conversations would be different for bun if AI wasn't involved.

Another point of view is that, if AI wasn't available, pre-port Bun wouldn't have been such a total mess that even Fable couldn't unfuck it.

IOW, the Bun codebase was being vibed well before the port; if AI was not available, would Bun have been in such a poor state that a rewrite was even necessary?

khalic3• 10 days ago

The AI panic has infiltrated the space now, and it’s just as bad as the AI hype. Half formed ideas, emotional posts with personal attacks and arrogant language, exaggerated claims, posturing, etc.

In the meantime, most of us are just using whatever tools are at our disposal and minding our own business.

netdur• 10 days ago

very narrow vision, openai and anthropic realized what they have probably won’t lead to agi so they moved the goalposts to replacing jobs, programming just happened to be the easiest field because engineers are technical, willing to pay, and the input/output is relatively easy to measure, even that has problems though, a lot of managers are noticing that code generation is fast but actual production output doesn’t improve at the same rate, anthropic basically bootstrapped itself on coding and now they’re looking for higher paying fields that put less pressure on their servers

sublinear4• 10 days ago

So much drama between all these completely irrelevant actors circling the drain.

Anthropic have lost their minds, and eventually a metric shit ton of money. Meanwhile, nobody uses Bun or Zig either. Rust continues to chug along very very slowly.

mdavid626• 10 days ago

Anyone still be able to trust Bun? It looks like piece of garbage to me. Doesn’t even offer much compared to node or deno.

bel85• 9 days ago

Rust Bun has been running Claude for some time now.

I'd be inclined to trust production code in such a large usebase.

finnthehuman• 10 days ago

The hearsay is essentially repeating what was announced publicly. Their job listing might as well have said, “now seeking applicants for total shit show”. It’s bad form for us to say this out loud.

It's a good thing to point out these unspoken truths explicitly. As people internalize the norms that make it bad form, it becomes easy to skip the mental step of acknowledging the problem. Even internally. But that quiet acknowledgement is necessary to keep oneself sane. Without it, the best case is someone steers away without good reason, at worst it leads to experienced and expressed frustration that doesn't add up and can snowball into the wrong places.

cropcirclbureau2• 10 days ago

I stand with Andrew.

As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus.

And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified and one in a long lines of successful psyops Dario and co. cooked and delivered.

Now, would Andrew's message have been better received if it had better "decorum"? Maybe. But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. You have to appreciate that.

laserbeam• 10 days ago

But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts.

If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.

stingraycharles2• 10 days ago

I also don’t really like his closing section, it has a big “sorry but not sorry” feeling to it.

bourbonproof• 10 days ago

Unlikely a useful lesson here. If it would have been written as "political correct" version up to the point of not calling Jarred out at all would have missed the core message. The fact that it was written blunt is the reason it went viral.

tonypace• 9 days ago

I think if the last decade has taught us anything, its that decorum has zero to negative value in public communication. People pay attention to drama, and you need attention to be heard. When the penalty for rudeness is gone, just go for contention.

iamflimflam1• 9 days ago

Early on in my career I wrote a highly critical email - I asked a coworker for his opinion before I sent.

He said “there’s just one thing that would improve this” and hit the delete button.

That intervention saved me, and everyone I was working with, from a lot of unnecessary stress.

Venting is great - get it out of your system. Then take a deep breath, go for a walk, and then decide what to do.

kordlessagain• 9 days ago

psyops Dario and co. cooked and delivered

Does that include Claude itself? Half joking aside, my main concern remains that both OpenAI and Anthropic practice this fear mongering as strategy at the executive level because they have to. A corporation is a different beast. Not human, exactly. Not AI either. What happens when a corporation starts being informed by the AI it is building?

If you want a lens into master craft corporate human slung bullshit, read this: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/944138/microsoft-ai-ceo-mus...

In this, not only did the interviewer admit he knew Suleyman had written about the issues he talks about in his rebuttals, he then says he's only asking (the hard question) because the "audience" wants it.

Suleyman's response talks about taking "accountability for the things that we build" and the "types of problems that we choose to work on," it highlights the fundamental flaw in the cloud-rented AI model.

In that ecosystem, "we" means a handful of corporate executives deciding what tools the rest of the world gets to use, how they operate, and what data they extract. All based on the profitability of the corporation. It is the absolute antithesis of a sovereign architecture where execution happens locally and the user dictates the terms of the system.

They are coming for open models. It's time to harden the gates.

jeremyjh3• 9 days ago

It was poorly justified up-front but frankly I did not need the examples to understand Jarred’s frustration.

What I found helpful were his explanation of how the interaction with JavaScript’s garbage collector created unique challenges for Bun. Andrew did not address this point at all. It was also helpful to understand how the test suite covered the new code - many people had assumed the tests were also vibe translated and couldn’t be trusted. Andrew pretends he didn’t understand that tests don’t catch all bugs, which is true of all software including Zig.

To me this whole exchange is mostly the typical “memory unsafe languages lead to time consuming and disruptive defects that can be almost entirely prevented with a choice of programming languages” versus the “git gud and don’t write bugs” response.

Layer on the AI tension, Anthropic’s involvement and Andrew’s classic Linus impersonation and of course its viral.

ActionHank• 9 days ago

Wankfluencer has now been added to my lexicon. It's a word that feels like it should always have existed, but didn't. So very aptly describes these personas who would pimp their own mother for a t-shirt with a logo on it.

cropcirclbureau2• 9 days ago

The fact of the matter is, the reason Bun chose to go with Zig in the first place was for clout and clout only. Bun is a textbook case of a wankfluencer operation: unnecessary rewrite of an existing useful project using the latest hot language or ecosystem to get lip-service by influencers and get easy VC buy in.

There's nothing wrong with chasing a little clout really but I was not surprised to hear Bun's engineering itself wasn't up to par. A single person was shipping not just a runtime but half the ecosystem/tooling justified by sketchy benchmarks? As someone very familiar with the effort it takes to ship solid code in Node and Deno and the ecosystem writ large, their early claims of performance and being production ready were very suspect and it was unfortunately proven false once it duped real projects into getting adoption.

Again, there's nothing wrong being overly ambitious and failing. But I dare anyone to refute that in Oven.sh and many other twitter first projects today (usually in the Js ecosystem), solid engineering and actual usefulness takes a backseat to being viral and being featured in some idiot's weekly roundup news segment.

If you're familiar with Kelley's and the Zig Foundation ethos, it's not surprising that there was internal clashes and drama with such a project.

moomoo112• 9 days ago

i appreciate people saying it like it is.

like linus lol

i hate marketing pr speak when it comes to technical things.

save that for the non technical customers

anthonypasq3• 9 days ago

what exactly is technical about personal attacks?

nozzlegear3• 9 days ago

Didn't Linus famously say that he regretted his behavior, that making things personal was not okay, and that he needed to change some of his behavior?

ksec5• 9 days ago

like linus lol

I am not even sure if that is an insult.

Linus attack on "things" he dislike and call the person out on it. I don't believe Linus has ever call out on that person's other non related behaviour.

People keep using Linus here as if they are the same. They are not.

budsniffer9525• 9 days ago

Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified

In what world do you think they have to justify a rewrite to anyone outside their company? Bizarre mentality.

antonvs• 9 days ago

Exactly. The people criticizing the rewrite for the most part are just trying to exert power from the wrong end of a parasocial relationship. And then they get upset when no-one takes them seriously.

mikey_p• 9 days ago

They didn't have to but Anthropic chose to open their mouth and announce their "reasons" for the rewrite. Don't blame anyone but Anthropic for this, they didn't have to try to justify it, but they decided to anyway.

Kiro• 10 days ago

I really don't understand what Andrew Kelly hopes to achieve here. Even the non-programmers at r/programming who usually piles on any type of anti-AI posts called it out.

I'm trying to not let this affect my thoughts about Zig as a language but it's hard.

randusername2• 9 days ago

TFA has an odd perspective.

Views are my own. I have no history with Zig. I’ve never spoken to Andrew Kelley

There are better primary sources to explain what ZSF is trying to achieve with its AI stance. Kelley's rant [0] was a bit much but the ZSF AI Policy [1] and Kelley's interview on it [2] are interesting and informative.

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

[1] https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ

shevy-java2• 10 days ago

To me it seems as if the AI corporations declared war on software engineers in general. I understand that many software engineers have already been addicted to e. g. claude (look at github, you see tons of "co-authored" rubbishness here) but to me it is clear that the AI corporations also work against the humans here - this example of the creator of the zig language (which I don't use myself, as I dislike several design choices made) being harassed by Anthropic shows this clearly as well.

bubblegumcrisis• 10 days ago

When I see bullet point lists, I hit the back button. Is this just me? The smell of AI- it's like rotting vegetables.

entrope2• 9 days ago

Probably just you. I use them somewhat frequently to make it clear where a set breaks down into alternatives or parallel factors. If there's a preface and trailer around a list of complex items, I think writing the list in one paragraph is often ambiguous and hard to follow. Using a bullet list within that kind of paragraph (IMO) makes it easier to follow what I think is important.

Ampersander2• 9 days ago

Well, yeah, most social media posts that contain a list or a table these days are ai slop.

samuell• 10 days ago

Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering

While this may be slightly overstated, my take on this is that AI progress should have us upgrade our view of the human brain rather than the opposite.

Wrote about it the other day:

https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/ai-progress-should-upgr...

skor• 10 days ago

hey, does anyone remember when Slack wanted to replace email?

RetroTechie3• 10 days ago

There's so much good stuff in this post.

Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?

Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite.

Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test suites). Also:

"this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk"

How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. As it is, the impressive bit is do such a big rewrite & result seems to work ok. Are Bun users happy with this?

To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok.

Edit: and fwiw, I don't think Zig community should get triggered on any of this. It says nothing about how suitable Zig is or isn't for project xyz, and Zig community is big enough to carry their own project & applications besides Bun.

herrkanin• 10 days ago

How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.

cyber_kinetist4• 9 days ago

clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries

This is not done by blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day. You do have to make conscious decisions about code architecture to manage Unsafe code, since you need choose the right invariants for your Safe Rust code to conform inside the module (Note that unsafe pollutes the whole module containing it, not just the code inside the unsafe block!)

petesergeant• 9 days ago

I would go further and say that anyone who doesn't immediately identify this either isn't thinking clearly about this, or is intentionally ignoring it. I have no horse in this race AT ALL and this is _obviously_ the advantage.

lunar_mycroft5• 9 days ago

Except that writing safe rust often requires designing the architecture around rust's ownership model, meaning a file by file, line by line translation doesn't necessarily leave you much closer to safe rust than you were at the start.

lennxa• 10 days ago

the rust is merged into main https://github.com/oven-sh/bun

and the rust version has been live in claude code since june 17th.

sph4• 10 days ago

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim.

Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it.

Speaking as the ‘average programmer’, I have dozens of brilliant ideas per day that don’t stand the test of time or scrutiny, and the very few that pass the filter don’t seem that interesting days later, or worth the effort at all.

Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

manphone• 9 days ago

It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

locknitpicker3• 9 days ago

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim.

I think it's more than that. These greenfield projects are actually things that, up until the inception of LLMs, they were not worth creating.

With AI code assistants, the cost of developing them is lower, but in the end you still end up with a project that no one bothered to create.

TeriyakiBomb5• 9 days ago

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and the wild asides you tend to talk yourself out of still on display.

throwatdem12311• 9 days ago

Maybe those ideas aren’t so brilliant.

BetterThanSober2• 9 days ago

I wonder how much they spend on this rewrite, in tokens and $ using commercial pricing

m4xp• 9 days ago

Keep in mind logic bug that ai makes are extremely hard and expensive to fix as the clanker needs to parse thousand and thousands of lines of text every prompt while a human tries to explain what it's obviously doing wrong.

I hate ai so much because its so easy to generate quick slop that "appears" functional.

budsniffer9525• 9 days ago

Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

Yes. I'm as pro-AI coding as people come, but this is the part that bugs me too. If you whip something useful up in a weekend, great!

But you don't have to present it like you are building an actual product. It's fine if no one else knows about it. Because the fact is, most people don't care, even before AI. Building for yourself is fine.

DonHopkins• 9 days ago

Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

I dunno, this idea guy seems to have some really great ideas, what's wrong with you skeptical programmers who aren't on board implementing his ideas for equity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q

deaux3• 9 days ago

I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

100%, you actually stated it correctly. It's not "I don't care unless you've written/reviewed everything by hand". If someone writes something by hand in an hour, including ideation, and puts it on Show HN, realistically it's almost certainly not going to be worth even looking at.

I've been running an app in prod for more than a year now, mostly vibecoded long before HN believed it was possible - HN only started believing this around Jan this year at the earliest. But nobody who uses it cares, or even notices, because it took a month to build. That's what matters, the amount of time and thought put into it. Of course it's true that vibecoded projects have a much lower median amount of time and thought put into it. But that's like Louisiana having a much lower median income than California, it's just a median, not an inherent characteristic of being a Louisianan vs a Californian, there are plenty of poorer Californians and richer Louisianans.

crowdhailer3• 9 days ago

Not heard sunk cost fallacy described as a feature before. Interesting idea.

ljm• 9 days ago

It's very strange to vibe code a project and feel both a lack of emotional investment but also the cognitive overhead of steering an AI.

The process of iteration, or the feedback loop, typically allows space to try things out and experiment and then either drop an idea or refine it more purposefully. And those breaks in between the pure delivery to focus on that gives you room to breathe and also see the progress of your work.

Blatting it out in 6 hours with Fable 5 skips all of that and you have something like an MVP, but you haven't really put anything of yourself into it. So why bother committing unless you can take that further or apply something novel or reflect your own personality in it? Or you genuinely believe you're on to something and the AI approach actually gave you a path to building it?

I've been 'vibe coding' something, I've spent about a month on it on and off along with a fair bit of debugging on some sticky issues. I still think I'd suffer going into that codebase and doing stuff in it by hand, no matter how well I thought I organised it all.

frou_dh• 9 days ago

Great point. It is simply lame impatient clout-chasing when someone goes out and promotes their project that is approximately as new to them as it is to the people they're promoting it to.

petcat• 10 days ago

Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something.

Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there.

I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

Just search "segfault" on the Zig issue tracker and you'll see why people are starting to be skeptical of the future utility of such a language in the face of something like Rust.

ACCount374• 9 days ago

I used to think there's a good niche for "better C" - and that Zig was the one language angling for that. A language that can be used in the same contexts as C, to do the same things as C code, in very much the same way, but with some modern features, some stronger guarantees and some helpful syntactic sugar? A welcome thing for embedded development.

On the other end, Rust to me felt like "better C++" - outside the embedded niche, aimed at complex multithreaded code that has to combine high performance with not catching on fire because someone fucked up concurrency once again.

But the main issue I had with Rust - that it's frankly a bitch to write, nearing Go levels of awful, only worthwhile if its paradigm is buying you a lot - is diminished if it's an LLM that's doing the bulk of the line to line writing.

And, on the other end, C's warts, footguns and ancient quirks also matter less if you have an LLM plow through it.

So, the niche for Zig does seem to be shrinking. The window for it to establish itself might be genuinely closing now. Which is a shame, because I like the idea of having "better C" a lot. But all of this drama sure isn't helping it gain traction.

p-e-w• 9 days ago

I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another language with a woefully incomplete library ecosystem to establish itself.

A true competitor would need to offer genuine extra value, such as dependent types or other formal verification features, to carve out a niche.

shirol2• 9 days ago

Just search "segfault" on the Zig issue tracker and you'll see why people are starting to be skeptical of the future utility of such a language in the face of something like Rust.

Zig has 110 open "segfault" issues [1] versus Rust's 175 open "segfault" issues [2]. So, by your logic, Rust is also bad.

edit: I was just trying to point out that the parent's "just search segfault" argument is lazy. Also, Zig is still in beta.

[1] https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues?state=open&type=all&...

[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20stat...

cfiggers2• 9 days ago

I would say the flagship Zig project is TigerBeetle, not Bun.

neutronicus4• 9 days ago

Yeah, I mean … as a C++ dev I have those same existential “what’s the point” questions about Zig.

pseudony3• 9 days ago

I program C for my day-job.

I see Rust encroaching in proposed transitions. It may even happen. That said, it is a poor match for it compared to something like Zig (or Odin). It's hard to make the new Rust code use existing allocator abstractions (so now you have two systems doling out memory, how do you reliably free composite objects with memory from both? How do they share?) and you increasingly have to either abandon any actual benefits of the borrow-checker, or invest increasingly heavily into sufficiently fat bindings to wrap your existing C/C++ in a way where the borrow-checker can assist you. That's before we consider the complexity of the language - I'd doubt a seasoned C programmer has much trouble deciphering Zig or Odin FFI bindings, but in the case of Rust? Yes, there is real friction.

Also if you really value predictable- and higher performance, being in more in control of memory allocations and cleanup is preferable. This is the direction both Zig and Odin cater to.

If you asked me what solves the most issues without adding too many new liabilities, I'd say Zig (or Odin). It would simply be much, much easier to transition a C codebase to either, and either would bring a much improved stdlib with pluggable allocators capable of leak-detection etc.

Tade0• 9 days ago

So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there.

Huge problem with this is that typically safe, idiomatic Rust looks nothing like unsafe Rust.

dnautics5• 9 days ago

the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C

I don't think anyone who actually uses zig thinks "it doesn't offer enough over C". Removing #define alone would have been worth it.

alexrp• 9 days ago

I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use

I promise you, hand on heart, that literally no one on the Zig core team is wasting their time on thoughts like this.

and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

Quoting Andrew:

So, when the Anthropic aquisition finally happened, we at ZSF breathed a sigh of relief. When the donation silently stopped, our bank account was ready for it. When they neither canceled their monthly meeting with us, nor showed up, we were not surprised. The relationship was over.

I advise you to take this paragraph at face value. Again, I promise you that it is the truth.

hypfer• 10 days ago

Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

Rel: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Ygg28• 9 days ago

It's funny, but I think the article is showing it's age. It's no longer true.

In hindsight having automated auto complete rewriting your code base wasn't something on 2000's radar.

Now switching from language to language is much easier. Just for Rust, there was Ladybird and Bun complete rewrite, that ran into zero things that Joel rallied about.

mekoka2• 9 days ago

As entertaining as that article was when it came out, I think its apparent wisdom should have been reevaluated for at least the past two decades. Even back when it was written, its pertinence was questionable, since it hinged on the perception that written code has particular value, to justify much of the failures at Netscape and Borland, neglecting many of the other -- probably more relevant -- business and human factors that were at play within the two organizations and their surrounding ecosystems. But lessons learned from watching startups fail in trove in the following two decades have mooted many of Joel's arguments. With the vantage of hindsight, if you read JWZ's account of what went on at Netscape, some of the dysfunctions become glaring.

Making software projects successful has always been about a lot more than just writing code. People have been "rewriting code from scratch" successfully even before LLMs. We just don't tend to call it that. We call it "cloning", "competition", "copy", "alternative-to", "reverse-engineering", "x-written-in-language-y", etc.

CrimsonRain• 10 days ago

That's such a bad take. You mention some good things they need to do but ignore the part that those are next steps and will take time.

You are acting like they need to complete everything at once...why?

Bun (rust) is not even released as stable yet and getting extensive usage on Claude code. They are making improvements and fixes. So what's the issue here?

hinkley• 10 days ago

But it’s really the same old problem we’ve seen for decades. Developers write code. Owners declare victory. Owners rid themselves of expensive opex. Owners sell the division or try to keep the project limping along but all they see is vaguaries from the new cheap guy who they keep telling isn’t good enough for a raise, company hemorrhages money and eventually sells for a song.

They’ve just found a way to explore that logical fallacy even faster.

nz• 9 days ago

Owners and developers. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Years ago, maybe in the late 2000s, when startups were becoming culturally significant, and "Tech" became an "Industry", two books were written and published: Founders at Work by Livingston, and Coders at Work by Seibel. I read both, and recall the Founders-book being a bit of a slog -- I only read it once[0]. The Coders-book, I have been re-reading it for more than a decade. I am sure there are many people who would express the _opposite_ sentiment.

The existence of _two_ books, published by the same publisher, within a few years of each other, is a kind of tacit acknowledgement, that there are two categories of people (Owners/Founders and Developers/Coders), that have a kind of symbiotic relationship with each other. That relationship has always been a relationship of convenience and gain, not resonance and understanding and appreciation.

It is, in a way, similar to globalization: nations will support it, only to the extent that it can make them (or their elites) wealthier, and not because they actually care about peace, or the magnificent diversity of human culture and creativity.

Just as the globalized economy is fraying, so is the symbiotic relationship between Founders and Coders. I think it started with the pandemic, which caused (without pointing any fingers) a tension between Founders and Coders, and has been accelerated by LLMs. In some sense, the tactics that were use by Tech companies to wow and win customers outside of Tech, are now being used by Tech companies on other Tech companies. And those tactics involve making grand promises to people who have knowledge-gaps, and are otherwise easily impressed.

I did not realize that there even was a symbiotic relationship, until I analyzed US degree-completion-rates for 1970 to 2011[1][2]. I suppose it should have been obvious, but these things are difficult to perceive from the inside (even if you've been working in the industry for an entire decade). The big problem is that the symbiosis is asymmetrical: founders get the money, and pay the coders, and are able to fire and replace coders at will, while coders can do none of this to the founders. This may have been fine, in an era where layoffs were rare, and getting a replacement job was less uncertain. But I suspect that the contest we are going to see in the next few years is: can Founders out-code Coders, or can Coders out-found Founders. Note that the Viaweb story (the archetypal startup-story for HN), is a story of Coders out-founding Founders (the equivalent of the late 90s era, did not found companies so much as administer small parts of them).

[0]: This is not a criticism of the author/interviewer, nor the interviewees -- the subject matter simply did not intersect enough with my own obsessions and fixations. I wish it did. It feels like I have some kind of color blindness, when it comes to "founder-y" things.

[1]: You can find a (fair warning: long) PDF here: https://galacticbeyond.com/pdf/two-percent-programmer.pdf

[2]: If you do not want to read all of that, here is a TLDR. The percentage of informatics-degree-completions never drops below 2% (which confirms an informal observation Knuth has made many times -- see his 3 or 4 oral histories and his interview in Coders at Work). The percentage of informatics-degree-completions rises and falls with business-degree-completions (the symbiosis is visible here). It never exceeds 4.5%, and such doublings coincide with bubbles (the dot-com bubble, and the 1980s AI-bubble -- there is a history section that helps narrate these numbers). Most intriguingly, informatics-degree-completions are _perfectly inversely correlated_ with healthcare-degree-completions -- their first-derivatives are nearly perfect mirror images. Also, the majority of graduates are business-graduates (accounting, administration, etc -- economics belongs to social-sciences instead of business), and their numbers have doubled since 1970, at the expense of social sciences and education (I suspect that this has had an impact on our (both global and American) culture akin to the impact that climate-change has had on our planet, but I have no data to put behind that suspicion, yet).

vga15• 9 days ago

I think the mistake people are making currently is that they publicize stuff way too early. I.e. they make a prototype and then put that out there. Possibly with a full product page and all.

People did this also before LLM, but the difference is that now the prototype is a fully functional product in the technical sense whereas before it was little more than a glorified Hello World. The human effort and calendar time used remains roughly the same.

There's gonna be amazing products made with LLM, but it'll take some time. Not as long as it did before, but still significant time.

andsoitis3• 9 days ago

There's gonna be amazing products made with LLM

You think more amazing than what was made without LLM?

jgalt212• 9 days ago

How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

It's not better, it's worse given the average bear's assumption about a rust project.

simjnd6• 9 days ago

I don't think Zig community is triggered, I think only Zig's creator is triggered because he is afraid of people interpreting this as "Zig is unsuitable for X".

I think a lot of people will, but those who do probably weren't the target audience for Zig in the first place?

busterarm2• 9 days ago

Context matters. Big announcements and uninformed blog posts can kill your momentum.

I still remember the Twitter dev blog where they abandoned Ruby/Rails and the damage that did. It turned out Twitter was doing a lot of stupid things and there was a mismatch of tools and their goals. They loudly blamed the tools and people ate it up because Twitter was big, visible and adored at the time. Their conclusions bypassed most people’s ability to reason.

Anthropic/Bun are big, visible and adored…

torginus2• 9 days ago

I don't even get what they gain by Rust - Bun imports Webkit, which is a C++ project, relying on it for stuff like JITing Javascript. I would say that's a major concern, and making sure the JIT doesn't emit anything broken or naughty is completely outside the scope of Rust.

woodruffw19• 9 days ago

I think their original post lays out the benefits pretty well. I think the realization of some of these benefits is debatable (for example, they probably could have made their existing Zig code faster), but others are straightforward (like having fewer crashes because more of your code is provably “safe” in Rust terms).

(I think wrapping a large, complex C/C++ codebase is where Rust often shines, if you build the right joiner abstractions. PyO3 is a really great example of that.)

lolinder10• 9 days ago

making sure the JIT doesn't emit anything broken or naughty is completely outside the scope of Rust.

It's also outside the scope of the project if they're using Webkit's engine for that part. Which means Bun itself isn't a JIT, it's all the stuff built around the Webkit JIT, so whether or not Rust is useful for the JIT is entirely immaterial to the question of if Bun would benefit from Rust.

lyu07282• 9 days ago

They listed some of the memory bugs they had in the blog post, I just looked at three of them, the first one was this:

heap-use-after-free crash in node:zlib when calling .reset() on a zlib, Brotli, or Zstd stream while an async .write() is still in progress on the threadpool

https://github.com/spaceraccoon/vulnerability-spoiler-alert/...

If you look at the fix you can see its all in their zig codebase:

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/621c4016218bb782e05907...

What is kind of funny is that nodejs also had a basically identical bug with an almost identical fix:

https://github.com/spaceraccoon/vulnerability-spoiler-alert/... https://github.com/nodejs/node/commit/53bcd114b10021c4a883b0...

But now the interesting question, how does the code look like in Rust?

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/8f1a9540fdff25410506de76...

It has the same guard in place as the zig and c++ versions, the rust code also just calls into the zlib bindings after the "write in progress" check.

So in this case at least the same exact use-after-free would've happened and they don't win anything from the rust port.

Another one was this:

crash and out-of-bounds read in Buffer#copy and Buffer#fill when a valueOf callback detaches or resizes the underlying ArrayBuffer during argument coercion

I think ths is the fix:

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/79522ab6c579736dc239fa...

But the bug here is in C++ bindings, Rust wouldn't have helped here either.

Last one:

double-free crash in the CSS parser when background-clip had vendor prefixes and multi-layer backgrounds

Fix: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/912970c98437e418a95b6b...

Code side-by-side:

Rust: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/8f1a9540fdff25410506de76...

Zig: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/912970c98437e418a95b6b5b...

I can't judge the Zig code, perhaps someone could say if this was a "beginner" mistake.

But this is at least one case where Rust would've helped, although even that is a bit complicated considering stuff like bun_ptr:

    // Lifetime-erasure helpers (RUST_PATTERNS.md §6/§18) — re-exported here so
    // crates that already depend on `bun_collections` (logger, css, js_parser,
    // crash_handler, watcher, http_types) can route the borrowck-dodge through
    // one centralised `unsafe fn` instead of open-coding the lifetime cast.
    pub use bun_ptr::{RawSlice, detach_lifetime, detach_ref};

Which is a bit concerning?

saghm4• 9 days ago

I don't have a strong stance on the overall issue of whether it made sense for them to port like this, but I feel like this misunderstands the value proposition of Rust. The point of Rust is not and has never been "make literally everything safe", it's "push the unsafe boundary as low as possible and keep as much as possible above it so that you can reduce the surface area for unsafety and more easily find bugs in the unsafe code". For some things, that means you can rely only on unsafe code that's in the standard library implementation, which is awesome. For others, you might need to rely on FFI to interface with external libraries, and that's obviously less ideal but still provides tangible value. In the worst case, you might need to write unsafe Rust code yourself, but you can at least take efforts to minimize the surface area of it by wrapping it in safe abstractions that enforce the invariants you need to uphold safety.

The idea that "anything other then pure safe Rust is useless" is common (even among some Rust proponents, but generally not the most experienced ones), but it's a pretty fundamental misconception of what Rust actually offers. Safety is a spectrum, not a binary, and while the extreme end of "everything is guaranteed to be safe no matter what" is nice when you can get it, Rust is literally designed to solve the problem of giving you the ability to slide along the spectrum to calibrate to the most amount of safety you an achieve rather than being all-or-nothing.

If you still think there's no value in enforcing safety outside of the lowest level stuff like JIT, I'd suggest being more explicit about why you're confident that memory safety bugs wouldn't be a concern outside of those contexts. I've yet to hear an argument for why I shouldn't be concerned about memory unsafety in even relatively mundane code in memory unsafe languages that doesn't basically boil down to "just be really really careful", which I'd argue has been empircally shown to not work even a little bit no matter how skilled the programmers writing the code are.

criley2• 9 days ago

Totally disagree that the value of a project is it's durability. The value of the project is almost entirely disconnected from durability. Value is simply the ability to solve a problem for you. I'll use a bad screwdriver before I use my fingers, even if I prefer good screwdrivers.

Claude Code was a vibe coded experiment, a "what if", that basically consumed software engineering in six months flat. Not because it's durable (it's not), but because the value it provided was so overwhelming.

People will use bad software if the value it provides is high. People will avoid the most durable and battle-tested software ever written if it doesn't actually provide value (solve a problem for them).

mooreds• 9 days ago

Yeah, I was just commenting on a LinkedIn post[0] (don't hate the player, hate the game :) ). In it, someone talked about the difference between creating software and owning it.

Creating software with AI is super easy--plan, prompt, test, go, go, go!

Owning software means you're responsible for maintaining it over time, fixing edge cases, operating it well, and more.

If you're building a one-off custom webapp to meet your needs, create away. If you're writing software for a business to run on, you're owning it. My fav article on this topic is this post[1] on durable vs disposable software.

0: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7482123...

1: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/disposable-code-is-here-to-sta...

cavoirom• 9 days ago

I guess the Rust rewrite is the exit path of the Bun's author so that the others could "handle" the code base.

pier25• 9 days ago

Are Bun users happy with this?

I've gone back to Node.

There was a poll on r/bun with about 2000 votes and only about 30% of users voting they were going to use the Rust version. Can't seem to find it now.

Edit:

The poll was deleted

https://www.reddit.com/r/bun/comments/1u3j4d7/are_you_going_...

piokoch2• 9 days ago

"How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?" - It will be worst, as this will not be idiomatic Rust. That's kind of interesting, BTW, as in next iteration LLM will be trained on tones of crappy code, created as some random rewrites, AI slops, etc., I am curious if someone will be able to curate this or it will be the same process of crapification experienced by Google Search that finally lost the battle with SEO spammers.

cactusplant7374• 9 days ago

Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

It is in the marketing. Most software engineers are not skilled at marketing, do not have a large audience, and are not willing to spend money on advertising. It has nothing to do with code quality.

deaton3• 9 days ago

I've always viewed unsafe Rust as a sort of last resort you use when you just can't do something safely. Porting something to "unsafe Rust" to me feels pointless, and of course this hasty rewrite was probably not the best idea from any perspective.

lolinder10• 9 days ago

If the end state were unsafe Rust, you'd be right, but that's explicitly not the intended end state. Unsafe Rust was the reachable first step. Now they have a Rust version and can iteratively remove `unsafe`, which they couldn't do before when it was in Zig.

Lerc5• 9 days ago

Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?

Because most projects are abandoned within months. Why should they be any different in that respect?

FeepingCreature• 9 days ago

Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?

I'm gonna offer an alternate theory. Because AI-generated projects are so cheap, there's no need to amortize them by advertising and creating a community. It works for you, you don't change your workflow, so there's no need to expand it. In this model, most AI-generated projects are done within days, not abandoned.

saghm4• 9 days ago

Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?
Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

I'm not convinced this explanation is self-evident enough to assert without any justification. I can think of at least one other plausible one, which is that maybe most side projects in general get abandoned after a certain amount of time, and being able to write the code a lot faster means that the point of diminishing returns for personal utility, enrichment, or pleasure are reached a lot faster.

causal2• 9 days ago

That battle tested bit is so true, always was. It’s hard for engineers to admit their hard work is worthless until they have let other people use and shape it.

UltraSane2• 9 days ago

This is why IBM still sells so much ancient z/OS mainframe code, things like CICS are the most tested code in existence.

pjmlp5• 9 days ago

And you can even program for z/OS and Aix with Go and Rust.

https://www.ibm.com/products/open-enterprise-sdk-go-zos

https://www.ibm.com/products/open-sdk-for-rust-aix

This is the kind of industry support Zig is still years away to get, and in the AI age, most likely will never happen.

hoppp2• 9 days ago

Its true about the battle test

I wonder if new version of Bun has the same emotional values in Jarred's mind, I mean he did write it by hand and struggled for a long time and invested a lot of energy.

Meanwhile the rust rewrite just magically appeared to replace it.

Which one is more valuable for a person? High Effort or low effort?

selfmodruntime10• 9 days ago

How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

It's worse, and I say this as an avid Rust fan and programmer. Try Miri with the new Bun project. It's currently blowing up. The Rust compiler's non-unsafe aliasing rules still need to hold during unsafe, which are far more complex than writing correct Zig code. That's the trade-off about Rust: The compiler has a ton of clever proofs for safe code, but if you're on your own, you'll have to do the work yourself.

sporkland• 9 days ago

There's so much good stuff in this post.

The post starts off so cynical. I know a few people at anthropic and oai and the simplest explanation also matches my observations that they actually believe what they say. That agents will be doing the bulk of the programming in the not so distant future. They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point.

They aren't managing some message and trying to teach the anti AI folks a lesson.

afavour5• 9 days ago

I know a few people at anthropic and oai
They aren't managing some message and trying to teach the anti AI folks a lesson.

Unless you know the senior execs in charge of marketing at these companies I don't know how you can make that assertion. I believe that a lot of the folks at these companies earnestly believe in the work they are doing. But a belief held by software engineers is not automatically shared by the marketing department, nor by senior execs.

"Anthropic is a giant company with a lot at stake and will seek to capitalize on any marketing opportunity" doesn't strike me as cynical so much as a statement of fact.

twister2920• 9 days ago

They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point.

now THAT is cynical

nsagent2• 9 days ago

Then they are naive. I've seen this a lot first hand during my PhD. Interpreting results in a way that reinforces their beliefs and ignores alternate hypotheses.

Frequently, those alternative hypotheses are demonstrated to be true. For example, "emergence" as was researched and proclaimed by many labs, including places like OpenAI and Anthropic is due to using too few discrete steps in sampling a continuous phenomenon. See "Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?" [1] for example.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004

krater23• 9 days ago

I'm sure that Jehovah's Witnesses believe what they say. But thats not a reason to let them in my house.

chuckadams2• 9 days ago

To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok.

Maintenance of the zig code was abandoned, while the port continued in the same repo, and it's unlikely any work on the zig branch will keep momentum. So yes it forked, but more in the fork+exec sense (or maybe just exec, the analogy's not that great).

ivanjermakov2• 9 days ago

According to Andrew, bun-zig is not something some brave soul would be eager to maintain.

We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.

Just "1MLOC JavaScriptCore wrapper" is enough to figure out why.

TacticalCoder2• 9 days ago

Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?

Because we have a near infinite number of artificial monkeys figuratively typing at a computer keyboard and, once in a while, they spout out something that looks like an acceptable program.

But it's not acceptable: it's sloppy-pasta.

Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

Yeah. I don't know if we live in the same world as some other HNers: I pay not one but three AI subscriptions: Google (through Google Workspace), Open AI and Anthropic. I'm switching from Claude Code to pi.dev atm.

I'm using LLMs daily. The person next to me too.

LLMs produce shit code. Pure unadulterated shit.

They're extremely useful for many things, including finding bugs. But, to me, they simply suck at fixing them. They write horrible, verbose, code full of bogus assertions and cases that are not handled or not handled correctly.

I do verify the output they produce: the number of time it "works" but I look at the code and see sheer horrors and say stuff like this: "wait, if you replace A by B like you suggest, shouldn't thing X that A makes be done too?". (it's a rethorical question: I know I'm right).

"good catch".

No. It's not a good catch. It's a totally obvious catch that any programmer who's been in this since more a few years (a few decades for me) would catch instantly.

Now if there's one area were they're semi okay'ish is for porting code from one language to another. At least you get a base to start from: if you're lucky. And I suspect it's only looks good if you don't know much about the target language.

Also don't be fooled: we're talking about a company with tens of billions investments that fully knows AI is not enough. You can be sure there are countless programmers fixing, behind the scene, the sheer mess that their AI (with unlimited budget btw) is creating. And then they pretend it's a 100% automated AI rewrite.

AI is not only definitely not enough: it's useful for finding bugs, it's a good rubber duck, but the more and more time passes, the more I'm appalled by the shit code it produces and by the errors they make all the time.

If I wanted to be facetious I'd say that at least we're already --how things moves fast-- long past the point were the kool-aid drinkers explain to us that these thing are intelligent.

It's summer 2026 and, as I type this, the SOTA models all suck at writing code.

Am I still deep into it? Sure am. For basically everything but coding (finding bugs, documentation, translation, generating assets, automating dumb stuff, ...).

Oh well, going back to pi.dev facepalming myself and rolling eyes. I know it's going to be "good".

redwood• 9 days ago

Of course the deeper points can be made that relatively few folks were actually using Bun. After all Bun was itself a faster horse compared to the dominant runtimes it was aiming too replace. Ironic, the way this whole meta conversation is playing out.

pizlonator• 9 days ago

I read a decent chunk of the rewrite.

It’s inaccurate to call it a rewrite. It’s more a transliteration - it matches the original Zig almost exactly but the syntax is different.

And yeah, unsafe blocks anywhere that rust would have complained

So it’s highly likely that the “rewrite” is exactly as reliable as the original.

(It sure feels like this was done for Anthropic marketing reasons, the more I think about it.)

joshgachnang• 9 days ago

I've run into a bunch of segfaults in Bun whenever I went slightly off the beaten path, probably from the "horrifying" Zig code. A huge test suite + a clean rewrite with a path towards more safety is how I would go about it too, personally. Now whether I would do that rewrite in Zig or Rust, I'm not sure. But I have high hopes it's going to work a lot better, especially since Anthropic uses Bun heavily.

Are LLMs better at writing Rust than Zig? I'd assume so, there's way more Rust open source code than Zig. And if so, that's a very solid reason to switch IMO.

ksec5• 9 days ago

I don't think Zig community should get triggered on any of this.

As far as I can tell No one from Zig community got triggered by this other than the Zig team. People were angry about Bun switching to Rust not because it is abandoning Zig, but this reckless behaviour of not letting users know up front, no migration path or two parallel version testing and basically trust AI on everything.

The internet was pretty much on Zig's side or at least between Bun and Zig they were Anti-Bun for a lot of things. That was until Zig's reply.

J_Shelby_J• 9 days ago

Agreed. That seemed to be the consensus in /r/rust

zem2• 9 days ago

I think the line is between AI-generated and AI-assisted - I have AI assisted projects that I have happily been developing for several months and they are going fine, I feel just as engaged with them as I did with my hand coded projects, but also I am more engaged insofar as I actively manage the architecture and the code, and see to it that the AI is following the plan I have in mind.

people chasing after "one shot" code certainly aren't helping, I agree.

overgard11• 9 days ago

Honestly I also think most vibe-coded projects are just.. kind of bad ideas. Which is fine! It's good to be able to determine an idea is bad quickly, there's value in that, but I think people ignore a really important aspect of creativity: the insights you need to have a good idea come from struggling in the muck and struggling in the medium. It's really hard to have good ideas from an ivory tower, you need to get into the details.

getpokedagain• 9 days ago

It's more than just the battle testing. Things that are not wanted by a community or by users are not important. AI delusion memes are fairly reductive but a commonality I see in many overtly ai evangelistic groups is an urge to build without motivation and agreement. The yes we can answer AI gives to user's every question is a failure mode trigger. LLMs are missing the filter an engineer with a human body may give you to an idea...

- Why would we do that?

- This seems pointless.

- This is fucking dumb.

arjie• 9 days ago

Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

No, this is a classic mistake. The value of a project is in the instantaneous utility it provides integrated over time. Some things are valuable because they are throwaway single shots that do a thing that's hard. In the past, making those was too costly for the value, but as software drops to near-zero in marginal cost they're worth doing.

e.g. the costco receipts site involves clicking through to view receipts and only 10 'view receipt' buttons per page. I might have stuck it out in the past, but instead I just described the problem to my claw-like and gave it my user/pass and it found it for me while I was dressing the baby. It wrote some Playwright code and this and that and drove the browser interactively.

That code is throwaway code but it was quite useful.

naasking• 9 days ago

Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?

That which can be created with little effort can be dismissed with little fanfare, since it can easily be recreated later if there's a need.

The other category of AI abandonware is one-off stuff. It did its job and there's no further use for it.

waterTanuki• 9 days ago

Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite.
Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test suites).

Not taking a side here in the whole Bun vs. ZSF dispute, but isn't the entire selling point of Rust that you get a bunch of battle-tested guarantees simply from compiling the program? Is there even a metric for battle-tested? I would say something like sqlite is battle tested vs a vibe-coded network server in c, but does that mean rewriting anything in rust truly mean starting all the way back at square one?

Also, didn't Anthropic roll out a version of CC using the Rust rewrite of bun? Surely they didn't just say "works on my machine" and chuck it into production?

JuniperMesos3• 10 days ago

From my perspective, Anthropic is the party we need to hold accountable here.

It's insane that Ray Myers thinks that Anthropic did anything related to this port that requires holding them accountable; the fact that he used those words makes me want to prevent him from having any influence over AI policy.

LtWorf3• 10 days ago

Funding and owning something makes you accountable yes, that's how it works normally.

nicce2• 9 days ago

Also pushing it for marketing purposes and giving free preview to Fable might contribute something.

TripolitianFish• 9 days ago

Inconceivable

slopinthebag• 9 days ago

For what, rewriting an open source project in a new language? It’s insane that in 2026 this is seen as controversial.

mtlynch3• 10 days ago

One of the things I find so disappointing about Kelley's behavior here is that he falsely accused Jarred Sumner of lying about fuzzing Bun, and then when Sumner showed evidence[0] that they've been fuzzing Bun for months, Kelley just silently edited his post[1] to walk back the accusation and never apologized or admitted he was wrong.

I commented on Mastodon[2] to point out to Kelley that it's dishonest to silently remove the accusation, as so many people were already talking about it, and it confuses the conversation if Kelley retroactively edits it, and he replied[3]:

the false claim is in the bun blog post not mine. I only changed the text because it's easy to lazily argue against it. Please read more carefully. They are the ones being deceitful not me.

Loris Cro, Zig's VP of Community, gave a slightly clearer response[4]:

Jarred's post has a section about what they "were already doing" to maintain their Zig codebase, which includes "24/7 fuzzing", which will make the average reader assume that the codebase has been fuzzed thoroughly, while in reality it has been for, what, 2 months before the rewrite?

Even then, I find it so bizarre that Loris thinks that if someone says, "We've been fuzzing Bun," and shows evidence of months of fuzzing, then that person is lying because "We've been fuzzing Bun" somehow implies something longer than two months.

The duration is irrelevant. If you say you've been fuzzing it and you've fixed bugs that your fuzzer found, then clearly you're fuzzing. The Zig team doesn't get to arbitrarily move the goalposts of what "fuzzing" means.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845652

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854921

[2] https://m.mtlynch.io/@michael/116896188093796421

[3] https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/116897155344411469

[4] https://hachyderm.io/@kristoff/116898483283387067

mi_lk2• 10 days ago

The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything

If you read the post again this sentence is not removed and Sumner did not refute that

mtlynch3• 10 days ago

Right, that part is not in dispute.

If Sumner says today, "We do X," then Kelley can say, "Nine months ago, Sumner did not do X," and both can be correct. What Kelley can't do is say, "It's an outright fabrication that Sumner does X today," based on an observation from nine months ago.

piker3• 10 days ago

Wow, it's unsafe Rust? That seems... like the worst of all worlds.

If nobody knows why the unsafe is required there's no way they'll be able to unwind it. If they can't unwind it then they're in a worse version of C (+ cargo).

kawogi2• 10 days ago

IIUC that was meant as an intermediate step (which isn't uncommon), which IMO makes the translation way less exciting.

The interesting part will be whether they can transform that "mechanical Rust" into something idiomatic. I'm waiting ...

piker3• 9 days ago

Fair, but that's also kinda like saying "we translated it to ASM as an intermediate step to C". The hard (and valuable) part is safe rust. If unsafe is everywhere, there will be abstractions that simply have to be reengineered to use safe rust. Maybe it's a way to hit the "finish line" quick in terms of using Rust but a pure unsafe translation seems almost as far away as the original Zig project.

bigcityslider• 10 days ago

Unsafe Rust makes me think they did this entirely because LLMs are better at Rust than at Zig, but let's see what happens next.

fnands• 10 days ago

Not a lot of it is unsafe, I think they said 4%?

It's practically impossible to write safe Rust when you are calling external libs written in C/C++, like they do for the Javascript engine.

piker3• 9 days ago

Sure, but you cordon that stuff off into small, bounded unsafe surfaces. My bet is the new bun is a crashy pile of garbage if they've just translated Zig spaghetti into Rust unsafe spaghetti with an LLM. Hadn't occurred to me.

4% is a lot in my world.

scotty79• 10 days ago

The Bun code is a mess because of their engineering decisions, including overusing AI agents to write and review everything.

Life would be paradise if people were just good for each other. They are not though. So you need a system for that case. Rust is a system that fits the modern real world software development dynamics than Zig.

jeswin• 10 days ago

Anything that can be written in Rust will be written in Rust.

I'm using Rust as a placeholder for a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics. It may not be a good thing, but there's no way around it.

karahime• 9 days ago

If we expand the placeholder, I think "Anything that can be rewritten in a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics will be rewritten in a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics" is a desirable state of affairs.

baq2• 10 days ago

This post is ultimately complaining about a build step consisting of an automatic translation from technically irrelevant language A to technically slightly less, but still substantially irrelevant language B.

I don't care what Anthropic says and what the CEOs buy, I care about my own output and the recent models give me 2x uplift easily, I'd say 10x in single digit percentage of the time and I know I'm not using them to their full potential. We're living in an era of mass produced software. You can still be an artisan in this era, but you have to be aware.

cvanelteren• 10 days ago

Nice write-up!

Animats• 10 days ago

Oh, they're converting Bun to unsafe rust. That's easy, but useless. That's the sort of thing c2rust does - transpile to an low level language which is unsafe Rust with a set of functions that unsafely emulate C pointer semantics. You don't need an LLM for that.

There's no point. It's not doing the job DARPA's TRACTOR program is trying to do - translate C to safe Rust. I've used c2rust. It works, but what you get out is like compiler output, not something you can work on.

151553• 9 days ago

That's easy, but useless

The Rust toolchain is a delight in comparison to Zig's, and the unsafe code only need be temporary until humans (or, gasp, AI) address each class of underlying issue.

This is a no-worse-off state to improve from.

cyberpunk• 9 days ago

Isn’t the point that it doesn’t matter if humans can work on it, as long as the AIs can?

Aurornis7• 9 days ago

Oh, they're converting Bun to unsafe rust. That's easy, but useless.

You really need to escape the Zig vs Rust language wars bubble to get a real read on what Bun was doing.

They started by attempting a more direct translation. Not quite transliteration but close. At this stage they wanted to bootstrap the codebase into Rust as quickly as possible using parallel agent sessions, which requires minimizing the number of refactors that cut across the codebase. After it was bootstrapped into Rust they continued on the rewrite to take advantage of Rust’s features.

The anti-Rust side has been clinging to that first step as evidence that it’s all broken, ignoring the fact that it was an intermediate step.

The “unsafe” part is also confusing a lot of non-Rust devs who don’t understand that unsafe is used in cases of crossing FFI boundaries, which Bun does a lot of by nature

endospore2• 9 days ago

ignoring the fact that it was an intermediate step.

They are going to release the "intermediate step" with all its issues as v1.4. I think that says a lot about which party is ignoring facts. (hint: not me, not you, not Andrew)

The “unsafe” part is also confusing

They are right in this case. The code base contains thousands of the most unsafe unsafe blocks I've ever seen in Rust.

devinodowd• 10 days ago

Great Article. I appreciate the amount of detail you went into here to give everyone a fair hearing. Will there be a recording of your talk at the software should work conference next week? Thanks!

aavshr• 10 days ago

I think Zig being a new and a low-resource language (not enough training data) is also one of the reasons Bun decided to use Rust as large language models will simply not be as good no matter how good the model is.

ACCount374• 10 days ago

My experience was that LLMs performed at Zig and Rust at about the same level? That is: worse than at something like JS or C or Python, but well enough to write code that works. And they only got better since I first tried them.

Intuitively, Rust would perform worse because ownership is a different paradigm, while Zig is far more similar to things like C/C++. But I guess that's canceled out by the disparity in the language resource base.

jeremyjh3• 10 days ago

This paragraph is written by AI. I did not notice it earlier in the piece:

The piece about the migration process is very cool, with details that are reusable. No complaints, I think that’s the real contribution here. I particularly like the honesty in explaining that this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk, paving the way for redesign in future steps. That’s a sensible move explained well.

poncho_romero• 9 days ago

Why would the author write this paragraph alone using AI?

jeremyjh3• 9 days ago

I doubt that is what happened, but this is where I quit reading so I did not evaluate the rest of the article. I'm assuming the previous section was either largely written by hand or it was much more carefully edited.

ozozozd3• 9 days ago

Pretty sure this section’s title was “Say something nice”

…he had to resort to AI for this part.

jonkoops2• 10 days ago

What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. I don't care that Bun was ported to Rust; I don't care that Andrew wrote a hit piece about it; I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush.

What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of refutation from Andrew that these are not actually issues or how they should be solved in Zig canonically. I'd really like to see an exploration of these arguments, specifically pertaining to the Zig code as it was written for Bun.

ozgrakkurt2• 10 days ago

Andrew essentially wrote that “bun code was bad anyway”.

And also he implied he doesn’t even want to engage with anything relating to this since Jarred is toxic and there is no value in the debate.

I think these points are fairly clear from his blog post

jonkoops2• 10 days ago

And also he implied he doesn’t even want to engage with anything relating to this since Jarred is toxic and there is no value in the debate.

If he doesn't want to get involved, then why even write this piece?

geraneum• 9 days ago

What I have been missing in all this debate is substance.

That’s strange because in this (and Andrew’s in lesser extent) post there’s plenty of substance on both technical, management and corporate influences like the difference of styles guides vs agent instructions, binary size, compile time, Anthropic’s marketing and incentives, etc. It’s hard to miss.

fg1373• 9 days ago

A few of which are on HN front page.

qwery• 9 days ago

The facts as presented from the Bun side show a lack of technical merit for the rewrite. This shouldn't be surprising, because rewrites are bad engineering, in most cases.

The Bun project was started in Zig by someone with a lack of experience using the language, despite the massive scope and complexity, and was effectively a rewrite from another language in the first place.

From the Bun post:

Bun started as a line-for-line port of esbuild's JavaScript & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig.

Then, a few years later, the entire codebase was thrown out to do another rewrite in another language.

What is there to address?

skybrian2• 9 days ago

Porting TypeScript to Go in 7.0 doesn’t seem like bad engineering. Neither does this port, given that that Bun started out in a somewhat buggy state.

zbentley• 9 days ago

rewrites are bad engineering, in most cases.

I think this situation is a referendum on whether that is still true—or, if it is true, whether the proportions on “most” have changed significantly due to AI.

afavour5• 9 days ago

TFA article addresses this directly. The write up is good but it is selectively written to contain almost exclusively positives.

Like build times: they rewrote the Zig compiler to improve them, but Rust build times are typically much slower. Why no discussion of that at all?

araoz2• 9 days ago

the best way I've seen it described is like this: Bun wants to move fast and breaks things, Zig forces you to move slow and carefully.

Bun wants to ship new features ASAP (a shell lang, sqlite/pg client, etc), so they'd really want stuff like memory management out of the way. Zig forces you to think and deal with memory management, lifetimes, etc. Rust is just a better fit like w `Drop`, and Zig explicitly won't add `Drop` or anything similar.

Just like I wouldn't write a SQL database in Python, Zig is not the right tool for Bun. So there isn't really anything that "should be solved in Zig canonically". I'd say it's more in how Jarred want the project to move forward. Move fast and break things.

iooi• 9 days ago

I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush

The people selling shovels are the ones building data centers and energy. Tokens are the "gold".

felixgallo• 10 days ago

People have got to stop falling for exaggerated rage bait.

lstodd• 9 days ago

But, but, how do we get to experience emotions otherwise? We have no life!

sarmadgulzar• 10 days ago

Writing the blog post took longer than the million line Rust rewrite. That is all someone with a few brain cells needs to understand what’s going on here.

rajayonin• 10 days ago

The marketing needed to focus on how their AI was powerful enough to do this rewrite (even though it was not powerful enough to catch a use-after-free).

ding ding ding!

witx3• 10 days ago

I'm with Andrew.

It was just a marketing piece. It offered many data and pretty graphics but only that, no way to attest the veracity of it.

r2vcap2• 9 days ago

Those problems are partly attributable to Zig itself. If the project accepted AI-assisted contributions, this controversy might never have happened. Completely shutting out one side of the industry and taking a dogmatic position is not helpful, especially for a pre-1.0 language that is still relatively immature.

Now the Zig community is attacking one of the largest and best-known codebases ever built with the language. Anthropic’s motives are clearly promotional, but even so, I would not choose Zig for any project.

vga15• 9 days ago

I'm on the same page with you that their AI stance is probably harmful for them -- but I think they wrote those as a reaction to the contributions from Bun and others. So your implied timeline is not entirely correct.

r2vcap2• 9 days ago

Nobody should feel insulted simply because a project decides to port its codebase to another language. It is a technical decision, not a personal attack.

Zig’s response has been a serious mistake. The TypeScript team ported the TypeScript compiler and language service from TypeScript to Go for TypeScript 7.0. Did anyone interpret that as the team insulting TypeScript itself? I certainly did not.

dgellow• 9 days ago

Completely shutting out one side of the industry and taking a dogmatic position is not helpful, especially for a pre-1.0 language that is still relatively immature.

It is useful, you just have different goals in mind than the Zig leadership. Zig shared their detailed reasoning for that decision, which is mostly about the development and protection of the community

Orygin2• 9 days ago

If the project accepted AI-assisted contributions, this controversy might never have happened.

Had I given my wallet to the thief, this controversy (me getting stabbed) might never have happened.

This 100% was a way to getting back at Zig for not allowing their parent company's product, and a marketing move for Fable.

akshaydeshraj• 9 days ago

| how their AI was powerful enough to do this rewrite (even though it was not powerful enough to catch a use-after-free)

This, I don't think enough people pointed this out. We have been sold the "coding is solved" and "software engineering is over" shit by Anthropic folks for a while now. The discourse should have revolved around claude's capabilities and instead it became a Jared vs Andrew thing.

jswny• 9 days ago

I agree with some of Kelley’s takes, but the issue is the tone.

Does anyone think that if Bun had been rewritten from Rust to Zig that a member of the Rust core team would have written a personal hit piece against Sumner (while pretending it isn’t a hit piece)? Probably not.

Kelley can write what he wants, but as the BDFL of a rising programming language, people are allowed to react if they don’t agree with the public image being portrayed by Zig.

handoflixue5• 9 days ago

"We wrap LLMs in Agent harnesses because AI isn’t enough."

This feels equivalent to saying you're not a real coder if you need a compiler to hold your hand. What, a human coder isn't enough?

Of course we're going to improve tools by building more tools on top of them. That's how we went from punch cards to assembly to high-level languages!

oblio3• 9 days ago

Anthropic isn't selling that, that's the point. Anthropic is selling "coding is solved", worth $1tn.

If they keep hiring developers and LLMs need huge procedural harnesses, then the hypocrisy is open for all to see. And worse for them, it probably means their business model is worth maybe 5-10x what Jetbrains is worth, not $1tn.

BetterThanSober2• 9 days ago

I agree that "coding" isn't solved but LLMs needing a harness is not necessarily a huge hit on AI

As for valuation, it's all a grift, always has been for anything hip in tech. SpaceX should've been in the $500b range and they have an actual rocket and working satellite constellations

ozozozd3• 9 days ago

Umm, yeah.

Obviously the neckbeard who wrote C in vim and compiled when he is done is a better coder than the one who kept compiling and fixed issues when told by the compiler.

handoflixue5• 9 days ago

The neckbeards that wrote C did so precisely because they saw how C was a better way to get things done, and they were probably the first people to start using compilers, because, again, they're the ones that built them.

The neckbeards that wrote C tend to view LLMs as the obvious next step, and a lot of them actively use them for hobby projects even if they're not quite "maintain the Linux Kernel" tier yet.

TonyAlicea10• 9 days ago

It would be inconvenient if maintainability still mattered because their products default to making it worse.

I think this is the most important line from this piece.

Incentives matter. The AI companies are incentivized to have us believe that LLMs are the new compiler. That’s ridiculous (a coding LLM is a very very leaky abstraction) but I hear coders, especially coders with poor fundamentals, say it all the time.

This entire AI period has been a study in marketing disguised as futurism.

I say this as one who uses and teaches AI. What fantastic, amazing, unreliable tools. Extraordinary in the right hands, but engines of cognitive and technical debt.

small_model2• 9 days ago

There is going to be a lot of this kind of thing as AI makes writing manual code optional at best. A project that bans use of agentic coding is going to have a slower development cycle, as Zig is already fairly pedestrian (for said reasons) it's going to become less and less relevant i'm afraid.

There will be a group of programming languages that become the main choices, (Rust, Go, Typescript, C++, Java, C, Lisp and Haskell) for agentic coding, Zig was slightly too late to the game, the great LLM cutoff has happened.

Andrew is trying to fight the tsunami here with a paddle boat as his vision of Zig was conceived before LLM's landed on the scene and is likely unable to accept it.

krupan3• 9 days ago

I love how many people are tech prophets now

small_model2• 9 days ago

Do think the majority of SWEs will be hand cranking out code like it's 1999 in a few years?

Havoc3• 9 days ago

Why are we even discussing stuff like work hour expectations in a story about language switch drama?

Even if the guy is a terrible manager this still comes across as a determined attempt to find something negative to say.

To me it’s telling how little focus there is on the technical merits of the rewrite from zig side. Anthropic claimed a bunch of victories and as best as I can tell nobody has even attempted to refute them.

If I was running a project and someone threw it into an LLM rewrite and it comes out with improvements and silence on downsides I’d be pretty worried and try to address that. Instead we’re talking about working hours somehow

nihsett• 9 days ago

Zig creator's article seems to have changed? I don't remember the bottom bit being there when I read it a few days ago.

Ray’s story: Faced with a legitimate challenge of memory bugs, there were several viable options. Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products.

Kinda makes sense. They also tried to make a C compiler earlier in the year. Idk what happened to that.

I guess it's an experiment without much downside for Anthropic, if it works use it to make a point about AI assisted coding - if it doesn't bun users will learn a costly lesson but who cares, it will just be another case study to make their product better.

That said, I think it'd be great to see this actually work out.

alex_suzuki• 9 days ago

Zig creator's article seems to have changed? I don't remember the bottom bit being there when I read it a few days ago.

Yes, Andrew edited it. Diff here: https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/commit/8b86ac915...

drbscl• 9 days ago

The thing is, it's possible to call a spade a spade without resorting to ad hominem. Andrew's post would've been more effective if he focused more on the Rust port being for marketing, and the shortcomings of Bun's Zig implementation.

Instead, the first half of it solely consists of personal attacks.

onesandofgrain• 9 days ago

AI is still 95% useless. The Zig article is spot on

Mistletoe• 9 days ago

I can’t imagine working at a company called Oven and expecting it to be a good time.

zombot• 9 days ago

An excellent analysis. So the Bun rewrite story is full of contradictions, irrationality, and bullshit. Not that that's really a surprise at this point.

upmind• 9 days ago

Andrew Kelley's thoughts on Jared Sumner is insanely savage.

crowdhailer3• 9 days ago

But fair?

luciana1u• 9 days ago

programming language creators have now fully pivoted from 'my language is faster than yours' to 'my corporate criticism is sharper than yours' and honestly it's an upgrade

IshKebab• 9 days ago

There's so much weaselling in this post. His suggested solution to Zig memory errors is to never dynamically allocate memory? I mean... come on.

He complains about the lack of motivational blog post until after the merge, but a) they aren't obliged to do that (where are all the "it's free so you can't complain" people now?), and b) they gave plenty of motivation in HN comments, the rewrite PR, etc.

I don't like the idea of AI slop code either but it seems to work at least reasonably well for porting from one language to another.

9999000009992• 9 days ago

Every one feels a bit wrong here.

Zig’s author, Andrew Kelley is out of line here.

We made futile attempts to guide them towards better programming practices. There were a few exceptional heroes who did their very best in a dysfunctional company. You know who you are. But you can't stop a rising tide.

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

So not only is Zig written by amateurs, but these amateurs also don’t know how to run a company?

Who is Andrew to say this, Oven got an exit. As far as their investors and owners are concerned that’s the only real reason to exist.

Assuming ( big assumption to be fair) all the early Bun employees got a fair amount of equity they’re all rich now. That’s a much better outcome than most startups.

At my first startup we had 6 day work weeks. I still remember staying up until 2 or 3am manually installing Postgres again and again. All we got was a paycheck. Although for me I went from a minimum wage earning college dropout to a 6 figure software engineer( at a new company).

As for actual coding… LLMs will always do better work in a well known stable language than something relatively new.

I had to give up on trying to get LLMs to write working Haxe code. Haxe is too niche for LLMs to handle.

I personally can’t stand Rust, it feels like it’s designed for machines to write. Zig is designed for humans. Outside of a 200k+ job offer you won’t see me learning Rust.

Zig is rather pleasant. I can imagine writing a side project with it.

Finally, my QA background is screaming in rage. You expect me to trust a project that you basically vibe coded in a week as a key part of my workflow?

You know it works because the automated tests ( which I guess you also vibe coded) pass ?

By that logic say I don’t like Rust, can I spend a few thousand in Fable tokens and ship DinnerRoll( Bun in D).

Is that enough to raise a VC round?

Thanemate2• 9 days ago

As for actual coding… LLMs will always do better work in a well known stable language than something relatively new.

Say that louder for the people in the back, who still think that LLM companies don't influence the entire programming language and framework field, by merit of the fact that LLM's can only perform at scale after lots of training.

And when we reach the point where source code doesn't need to be read, said companies will vendor lock you even harder by marketing their own LLM-optimized language and framework, promising everything and the moon in terms of productivity gains. First class support was the reason they acquired Bun.

Havoc3• 9 days ago

can I spend a few thousand in Fable tokens and ship DinnerRoll( Bun in D).

Probably. Likely would work with sub fable class model too.

Is that enough to raise a VC round?

Doubtful. Think this move only works for someone with an existing product and following

9999000009992• 9 days ago

Doubtful. Think this move only works for someone with an existing product and following

So what you’re saying is actually build it, get it in the hands of end users and then find co-founder who does nothing but call his VC friends.

Maybe this co founder will be merciful enough to let me keep a 5% stake. Although in all seriousness, given Oven sold for ( Google AI estimate) hundred of millions that would still be more money than I’d ever need.

adamddev12• 9 days ago

In this whole discussion of what can be done with AI, I think a lot of people are missing the distinction between:

A. making consumer end-user apps, basic enterprise applications (making end products)

B. making tooling, libraries, languages (making things people build on top of)

What is the "software engineering" that AI will replace? A? Or both A and B?

Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps that are "good enough" or pass test suites, does NOT meant that therefore people can get away with doing all software engineering with AI. B products require a whole other level of quality, stability, and extensibility.

I'm not saying doing A with AI is a good idea either, I just think that it's a fallacy to say that because you can do A with AI, you can do B.

skydhash3• 9 days ago

Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps that are "good enough" or pass test suites

That requires some proof, because the trend is that users of A apps dislike the lack of engineering that comes with AI involvement.

adamddev12• 9 days ago

Yes, I agree. I'm just trying to be charitable for the sake of the argument. I think it's better to make nothing with AI.

ChrisArchitect• 9 days ago

My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352

Rewriting Bun in Rust

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837877

Keyframe3• 9 days ago

Sarcasm hat on - You know what, if LLMs were so infallible at coding and engineers useless for hands-on, then why even bother with anything except asm or even skip the mnemonics completely and go straight for the binary? Why even bother with abstract code when abstraction is now your LLM.

151553• 9 days ago

Because underneath the code you have more than one architecture to support.

Keyframe3• 9 days ago

if LLM is your abstraction - you give it a task to produce multiple targets. EASY PEASY, next!

cryo32• 9 days ago

Great article.

Makes me glad I still write C!

fg1373• 9 days ago

I have no beef in this flight -- I don't write Zig or Rust or use Bun (other than using Claude Code which runs on Bun, but that's an implementation detail that I don't care). But the more I look at this, the more I despise Anthropic and respect the Zig foundation. One is like "we can do whatever we want because WE HAVE MONEY, what can you do about it", the other looks at things from a engineering perspective.

It will be sad if everyone buys Anthropic's hype, forget the basic engineering principles in this industry and think that AI solves every problem. Fortunately lots of people don't.

soupape34• 9 days ago

Interesting thread. On the verification side — do you think formal methods or fuzzing scales better for catching the class of bugs LLM-generated code introduces?

CamouflagedKiwi• 9 days ago

Interesting article, seems more balanced than Andrew Kelley's one that it links to.

The thing I still think is wrong: why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust? Why not rewrite Claude Code itself in Rust (or Go or whatever, lots of options there) and drop Bun completely. That actually seems like an easier solution (rather than having to create a performant, correct Javascript runtime, just rewrite your CLI console app in something else) and the final result is better (smaller and faster) although likely not on the most critical axes for them.

andriy_koval2• 9 days ago

why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust?

there is a chance they tried..

VBprogrammer• 9 days ago

I think the only point that matters is that having Anthropic owning a project which is written in a programming language where the community (or at least the leaders of it) have come out as openly hostile to AI generated code is a clear conflict of interest. I think Andrew Kelley might have been better to say just that and leave it - the comments about Bun's founders energy and motivations don't really add anything worth adding in my opinion.

randusername2• 9 days ago

Yeah, hard to imagine opposing AI absolutists settling their differences.

IMO all the technical arguments and attacks are post-rationalization; different orgs, different contexts, different goals.

I think Kelley saw this, but couldn't resist muddying his point. I give him a pass. The rant [0] is too much, but the addendum about moving on is healthy, and I'd rather the BDFL be too spicy than not spicy enough.

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

ticulatedspline• 9 days ago

A lot to unpack here, setting aside the drama I get a few takeaways:

- Your AI code is probably as good as your human user's skills and attention:

Seems pretty likely they were shying from style guides because the AI use was itself sloppy. I'm not a big AI user but if I just ask a chat model for some code it will give it to me, then I have to go over it and fix the code for our check-style. Without deliberately aligning all your AI use to enforce it style is hard to maintain. Existing lack of style was a technical debt they didn't want to pay.

- The most popular language is probably the best language:

I suspect the amount of training data on Rust is several orders of magnitude greater than Zig. I suspect they could have gotten there simply asking the LLM to rewrite the Zig thing in Zig, however I'm betting LLMs write much better rust code so why not take the opportunity to move to a language that will get all-around better results.

- Technical bankruptcy is more favorable than paying technical debt:

These migrations we're seeing seem to point to a future where it's simply easier to burn a code-base to the ground, take the test suite and re-implement rather than actually pay large amounts of technical debt. I think this is a pattern that will come up more often with heavily AI written codebases that become untenably noodley, or brittle.

sire-vc• 9 days ago

The more I interact with the real world and mature as a person the less respect I have for temper tantrums such as these. Even if everything you say is correct, coming across as emotional and petty just does not help your case. This just makes Zig look like a zealot fighting a turf war rather than a serious ecosystem.

TheRealDunkirk• 9 days ago

Good grief! I can count at least 6 logical fallacies in your 3 sentences.

dogleash• 9 days ago

The more I interact with the real world and mature as a person

I don't think this statement has the effect you want it to have. You're not laying out the experience you're speaking from. You're just setting it up so that no matter how reasonable the next thing you say is, it will appear maximally arrogant and condescending.

bel85• 9 days ago

I disagree. It's fine to contextualise that an opinion solidifies over time.

And your parent is right to point out that emotionally loading posts tend to be a disservice to the message being carried.

wolttam• 9 days ago

Andrew may be a little bit grating to some (including me at times), but I value the perspectives that he brings.

There is a lot of discussion about the exact tone and phrasing, etc, of Andrew's post. There's something there - we expect perfectly composed writing, never getting emotional, never saying how we actually feel about a specific individual's behaviour. Meanwhile, in private, we often let those emotions fly, name names, etc.

I think Andrew gave us an actual look into how he feels about Jarred -- ambivalent, largely.

cgannett• 9 days ago

"A lot of reasonably good coders have never seen an example of a good manager, and have all kinds of weird ideas about what management is."

Banger of a quote that one.

TacticalCoder2• 9 days ago

BTW a quick question...

Isn't it a case of "SVN trying to be CVS done right", as Linus Torvalds famously explained during his talk about Git at Google: SVN was doomed from the start because it's not possible to do CVS right.

Is this Typescript Zig any good? (don't know anything about it) Is it even worth porting to another language?

And why not an entirely new project? Ain't it an admission of failure of LLMs at writing new code? (porting ain't the same thing at all as writing a new project)

No dig at Zig: I just want to know if it's not yet another turd of the extremely turdy JS ecosystem.

blastonico• 9 days ago

There are billions of lines of garbage code out there written in C, C++, Java, you name it. So much garbage, it has driven people to create languages with tighter guardrails to help programmers.

Yet, I've never seen those language creators blame anyone else. I don't recall Bjarne Stroustrup lashing out at people migrating from C++ to Java, Rust, or anything else.

Maybe humility is just a generational thing.

yearesadpeople• 9 days ago

Wow. Wonderful post; best read this year so far. Lots of gold in this one. I like the way the author slowly undressed the - social media influenced - hype to reveal both Anthropic and Bun as they are: awfully basic

edude033• 9 days ago

Not to "glaze" the author as the kids say but this has to be one of the best written musings I've read on HN in a long time. I'm likely bias because it's written in "my style" but I feel like it's a rather fair and balanced approach to a nuanced and socially difficult topic.

bergheim• 9 days ago

what I don't understand is, given the anthropic narrative, why on earth rewrite bun to rust, and not claude code to rust? why use typescript at all when the whole point is that languages don't matter anymore? I suppose it is solely because it would be a bad look on them to rewrite claude itself - it means they failed - but rewriting bun is a much better narrative - claude is fine! it's just his runtime we need fixing. and here is that token heavy story!

so weird people are not commenting on this.

it's like.. I dunno, rewrite linux in rust, because bun uses glibc, this will somehow make it better, so claude code somehow can run better?

hell, start with UEFI.

softwaredoug• 9 days ago

Probably because agents in typescript don't waste time reasoning about so many different problems that come up in a lower level language. They stay higher level, and don't waste context on thinking about borrow checking, like you would in Rust.

mawadev2• 9 days ago

I think this post completely destroyed anthropics narrative

mawadev2• 9 days ago

There are a lot of posts going on, but let me just post this link to a specific file of the bun zig code base so you can have your own impression:

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/bun-v1.1.42/src/bundler/...

My take is they vibe coded too close to the sun

bel85• 9 days ago

I'm left with a good impression.

Lot's of comments on the whys and historic context.

Backed by tons of tests.

Yes the file could use some modularisation and splitting into smaller parts but maybe the gains were weighted and judged against.

That file is a great example of KISS.

doug_durham• 9 days ago

I don't agree that Anthropic's position is AI is all you need. My interpretation is that it's about developer acceleration. I've been following their messaging closely and it's not that you can fire all of your developers. It's mostly their developers saying they are somewhat more productive. They have published papers showing that productivity gains are uneven.

mannanj• 9 days ago

It's hardly really about Anthropic. It's about all the people who funded them, and other AI companies, who are on the campaign by funding Anthropic seeking to end a majority of life for most humans.

Because that's what it really appears to be about, preserving a rich man family's legacy so his children can live for another few generations before they over populate and humanity repeats the cycle of indefinite war, hoarding of resources, and killing to have more for yourself. I guess every rich, powerful generation though doesn't think that future will come now, so they keep manipulating their way to extracting more and more from people and stealing their way to the top.

When a majority of the population is sick, naive, and overstimulated its not hard to convince them with your propaganda that that you are on their side and that the sacrifices they make for your power are worth it. of course they don't see how their life spans, their deaths, etc were for you cause and not theirs.

buredoranna• 9 days ago

we still need good judgement and communcation in deciding where to go

I want to emphatically endorse this statement.

This is where the human workload will shift to: making good decisions... understanding why one path is preferred over another. And collaborating and communicating in constructive ways. More to the point, humans excel at being able to recognize when a chosen path is no longer fruitful, or where a conversation devolves into the unproductive.

We are constantly making decisions based on tradeoffs. We choose one approach over another, not so much because our chosen path is obviously superior, but because the peril on our chosen path is preferential to the peril on a different path.

I have used ai to great utility in my design process, to help me understand the tradeoffs within any given endeavor, greatly helping in choosing which path to take.

Thus far, I haven't seen an AI which can unilaterally be relied up on to always effect "good judgement" for the work it is tasked with completing.

But once good judgement, and the correct path, is codified in markdown files, ai can be exceedingly efficient in carrying it out.

daitangio• 9 days ago

Sometimes I suspect the rust-rewrite is just a way to advertise Claude Code power.

In all my professional carrier so far, a full rewrite without reason is a recipe for disaster, see

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

This Joel Sposky article is always my northstar when I have such "temptations". My 2 cents

ubedan• 9 days ago

I agree that both Andrew, and the author have numerous good points, and yet I see things differently.

- I too am a fan of Andrew, and Zig, although all of my future plans currently are tied to Rust.

- I think the crux is that we are talking about 2 Vibe-ish AI rewrites, one to Zig, and another to Rust. I believe the investment in both reasonably minimal beyond the cost of tokens.

- I think that more adherence to a Zig style guide would probably have been very beneficial to the final work product.

- I have high expectations that the Rust rewrite will yield a more stable work product out-of-the-box. I am looking forward to the post-analysis.

blacksqr• 9 days ago

I have found myself wondering a lot lately about the alternative universe where all the effort and resources devoted to developing and using AI coding and debugging agents were instead simply dedicated to fuzzing human-generated code. How would the code quality and total usefulness of the results have compared?

ozgrakkurt2• 9 days ago

It should have been possible to build a new LLVM alternative, a new chromium like browser and some other similar things imo and that would have been definitely more impactful for me.

It is unimaginable how many static analysis tools or fuzzers could have been created with a fraction of LLM investment too.

For example honggfuzz was created by a single engineer possibly in less than a years’s worth time

segmondy• 9 days ago

if I had to pick a side, I would pick Andrew but I don't think his side matters as much. IMO, it doesn't matter the technical reason why Jared ported Bun, it's his project, his wanting to do so is enough. I think the issue is that Jared turned it into a technical subtle reason of why "Zig is bad" without meaning to, and Andrew goes on the defense.

All that said, the coolest thing is that Jared did so, I don't care if it came out a bit worse with Rust, the interesting thing is here is what can be done with AI/LLM/Agents today. Yes, it might be worse, but on a reasonable enough timeline, it will get better. Folks get upset about these things. I did AOC in 2024 with LLM, my goal was not to top the leaderboard, but to see how good LOCAL LLMs could keep up. I did it with Qwen2.5-Coder-32B locally, and solved about 50%. Folks were often upset when I shared that, called it cheating, etc, even tho I often started about 8hrs after the competition due to timezone. It was so good, I suspected the cloud models would probably solve 75-80% and I concluded after my experiment that in 2025, LLM can solve it 100%. I didn't bother to try and the models were an order or magnitude better locally.

No matter the take on AI, they are very capable tools and we are only beginning to figure out how they can be used. I don't think we should stop, surely it's frightening on what that would mean if it can really "takeoff". This fight is multi layered, Zig vs Rust, Writing good code vs bad code, having good development standard vs not, being honest and transparent in technical disclosure, attacking Zig vs attacking Jared, AI good vs AI not, etc.

tipiirai• 9 days ago

In the AI bubble, we are pressured to build things nobody wants, poorly. Pop the bubble.

I'm sooo waiting for this to happen. I miss the old times where simplicity, clarity, and good architecture mattered.

ericyd• 9 days ago

By far the most satisfying piece I've read in this saga. Favorite line:

I’m not the one saying that their environment resulted in a buggy unmaintainable mess, Bun is the one saying that.

overgard11• 9 days ago

I'm not involved in this community, but I watched Andrew's interview with JetBrains a few weeks ago and I was really impressed. I don't currently have a project that would benefit from zig, but it's a language I want to explore when I have a good use case for it. I view his take as blunt but entirely reasonable.

Bun's rewrite has made me nervous about using it. I do have a project that would theoretically benefit from it, but that amount of vibe coding just makes me nervous. I'm not saying I'd never use it, but personally I'd rather wait for the dust to settle on it a bit. I feel like rewriting to a new language is going to be buggy no matter what (even if the tests pass), but an AI rewrite in a very short time makes me extra concerned. Just my 2 cents.

Also, one thing I want to highlight in the article because I agree hard with it:

My advice? Don’t work for people that brag about 90 hour weeks. Work for people who will defend your ability to sleep at night.

I used to work in the games industry, where crunch was the norm, and I don't think crunching really helped at all past a couple weeks. I'm not particularly old (early 40s), but my performance falls off a cliff if I sleep poorly or don't practice self care. To me, people working ultra-long hours for marathon periods of time are making a grave mistake. It usually ends up being productivity theater rather than real productivity. Taking care of yourself is really important for being productive.

ozozozd3• 9 days ago

If left to my own devices, I can code 12-16 hour days. Have a crash day every 4-5 days, and then go back. It would be extremely unwise to merge even half of that stuff. I would frequently throw it away. Even before AI. It would be extremely naive to think that I am productive/efficient or responsible or a hard-worker for doing this.

Hey, I can party the way I like to party.

(I am old enough to catch myself and stop this cycle now)

Edit: I was super impressed with him in the first 10 minutes. It’s very Knuth-like to create a programming language because you had trouble building an audio system.

roncesvalles• 9 days ago

We’re supposed to let the Tech Bros go on about how cutting corners is some genius productivity hack.

Vibecoding in a nutshell

dwaltrip• 9 days ago

All I can say is... Wow, what a clusterfuck.

bohrshaw• 9 days ago

nurettin• 9 days ago

Anthropic should make their own language, and openai should follow suit.

superloika• 9 days ago

Bravo for Andrew! We need strong leaders, not weak ones.

AbstractH24• 8 days ago

Like any hype cycle some of it is… hype

And like anything in the world things change.

So will there be change in the way we code? Certainly. Are some claims overstated? Certainly.

gstestaccount• 8 days ago

I wonder how AI is going to affect language development and discussions like this. Zig taking anti AI stance is commendable, but it’ll surely hurt adoption.

ajpikul• 8 days ago

The only reason we're paying attention to this is because of the drama.

The fact that rust is likely more interesting than zig (which is also interesting) is indictated by community size (and other signs like linux kernel inclusion).

The fact that anthropic is very likely overselling their timeline and max-utility for an IPO is generally well accepted as well.

Also that us tech bros are somewhat annoying is also well understood.

But who doesn't love a good street fight?

goofy_lemur• 8 days ago

All right there is so much hate for this rust rewrite, but I'm going to tell everybody that people are way way underestimating how sucky the Zig codebase was.

Basically all the time people were having horrid memory leaks and stuff that they couldn't even figure out.

So yeah, I get it, people are frustrated, but stop pretending Bun was this battle tested mature thing. It was a prototype, and still is.

Switching it to Rust is understandable since they just couldn't fix the memory leaks. It was and still is in beta, because anything with memory leaks is beta.

So yeah, I understand the concern but nobody would ever use it in production anyways for a server now because of the leaks so treat it like what it is - beta software and a cool experiment.

Thanks all!

Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

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