I wouldn't call any port "prudent". In general, taking mature software and doing any major rewrite is one of the riskiest thing you can do. It is a large scale attempt to fix what isn't broken.
Sometimes it is worth it, but it may also kill projects. A risky move. And AI doesn't help its cause. AI can save a lot of time when making ports, it is one of the things it does best, but it doesn't protect from regressions.
I am not using Bun in production, but if I was, I would consider it a risk. Not because of Rust vs Zig, but for changing things that work.
There is like 1,713 open PR's on the Bun repo. I'm assuming all are from Claude or robobun?. I guess this gives us an insight on what the claude-code workflow look likes. Crazy times.
> Most are created autonomously by @robobun, checked for duplicates with a GitHub action (powered by Claude), reviewed by @coderabbitai and @claude. Meanwhile the CI is broken and @robobun finally closes a portion of its own PRs because they duplicate other PRs it has written. (Merging into main is still done by a human.)
What a weird take. I do a ton of OSS, and the act of writing code is what makes it fun for me. If I were forced to use an LLM to write all my OSS code, I would just not do it anymore.
> I expect OSS to go the opposite direction: no human contribution allowed.
How is it an incorrect interpretation? Jared is indeed pitching/suggesting/predicting that human contribution will not be allowed in the near future, i.e. banned.
"Pitching" generally means that the person making the pitch is endorsing and pushing for it. (This might also be a regional word meaning/usage difference type thing.)
The person upthread should have said "predicting".
Jesus christ, This is the thing which should be talked about more. What an abysmally bad take. This actually makes me worry about the faith of bun more than any other thing discussed here.
Zig has some advantages for such projects, especially in the beginning.
Among them:
- much easier to iterate on (due to the language being simpler and compilation much faster)
- native C/C++ interops (Zig can compile C and C++ and mix it with Zig) which is crucial for a node-replacement runtime that runs an open source JS engine
- fewer dependencies and trivial static linking
I guess that now that they've been acquired by Anthropic there's this combination of having both in-house Rust talent, AI which does better on Rust, and the funding and resources necessary to undertake such a migration.
Also: Anthropic bought Bun to not depend on node.js. But now they are dependent on Zig which is a moving target and is hostile to them because not accepting their contributions.
Anthropic makes claude, claude can write Rust like a champ and struggles at Zig. It's a straightforward "training data" argument.
I think there are even longer term plays that Anthropic should be looking at, in this space, but it seems like they've decided rust is the right thing, so fair play. I would be (am!) thinking about making an LLM optimized high level language that you can generate / train on intensively because you control the language spec.
Claude doesn’t write Rust like a champ. It’s still miles ahead at js and python than it is at rust. It can do macros and single file optimizations but its gotten really stuck in type hell and tried to dyn everything on multiple occasions for me.
Claude struggling at Rust: not getting types correct, using the wrong abstractions, not implementing things correctly
Claude struggling at Zig: the above + memory safety issues if you run “fast” mode.
It is generally true that Rust code tends to be written in a way that the compiler catches the issue at compile time. The same is not as true for Zig, Python or JS
I'm reminded of the old joke "how to shoot yourself in the foot in 25 different languages". The first one was "C - you shoot yourself in the foot." Zig remains very close to that philosophy.
So the difference is not in writing new stuff but in maintaining the existing codebase. Rust's rigidity makes it potentially harder to break stuff compared to Zig's general flexibility. As a project grows and matures, different types of contributors naturally come in and it's unreasonable to expect everyone to learn about historical footguns that may have accumulated.
100%.
For many people, Bun is the only reason they've even heard of Zig. I'm not in a position to comment intelligently on comparative language features per se, but when it comes to mindshare and community size, Rust is a clear winner.
alt runtimes are still pretty niche, but deno and bun do have some degree of adoption. For Bun, the runtime is actually sometimes perceived as unwanted baggage, (eg a consulting client of mine wanted to pursue bun for its build tooling but had no interest in changing the runtime). IMHO, node (with Vite and PNPM) is the right call for the vast majority.
If anything it’s a tool for making people outside of Singapore like/want to do business in Singapore, so if that makes it some twisted kind of utility then I guess anything can be a utility. Not like they have domestic flights.
> A smart music setlist manager that downloads chord charts, creates spotify playlists, and automatically drafts emails with attachments and practice schedules
> It's surprising to me how much LLM "personality" seems to matter to people, more than actual capability.
> I do turn to Anthropic for ideation and non-tech things. But I find little reason to use it over codex for engineering tasks. Sometimes for planning, but even there, 5.4 is more critical of my questionable ideas, and will often come up with simpler ways to do things (especially when prompted), which I appreciate.
Aren't you saying here that the LLM personality matters to you, too? Being critical of you is a personality attribute, not a capabilities one.
Not necessarily. Criticism is the analysis, evaluation, or judgment of the qualities of something. This is a matter of intellectual act. However, you could say that being habitually critical can be partly a result of "personality" or temperament.
(Of course, strictly speaking, LLMs have neither temperament, "personality", nor intellect, but we understand these terms are used in an analogical or figurative fashion.)
This is a pretty obvious misinterpretation. Protagonist bad ≠ antagonist good. This isn't even the law of the excluded middle because there was only ever a statistical relationship between the morality of narrative opponents.
Zig is a great language and I want to see it succeed, but this is a prudent move for Bun.
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