Comment by yladiz

11 days ago

Why? Are there particular reasons that the maintainers of Bun feel the need to attempt to migrate from Zig to Rust?

Possibly related to https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/30/zig-anti-ai/ where the Bun team wanted to upstream work to Zig that was rejected by a blanket anti-LLM contribution policy.

Zig is a moving target that has breaking changes in every release (which is fine as they are sub-1.0). But that means that AI tools have been trained on outdated syntax/etc. Zig isn't that common, so there is even less training data to begin with.

Rust on the other hand is pretty established by now and has less breaking changes. It also has more compile-time safety-guarantees that makes vibe-coding a bit more confident.

In top of that, Zig has rejected their upstream contributions. So they'd have to maintain their own compiler in the long run, which is probably just technical debt to maintain.

  • Most of my vibe coding is in zig, and it has been my experience that Claude and Codex both keep up with zig changes just fine. Every now and then I catch them writing outdated code that they burn some tokens on, but my experience says your local codebases’s idioms will influence what gets generated enough to stop this from being a problem.

Probably an experiment due to Bun's PRs to Zig being rejected (Zig does not allow AI use). If Rust works well enough, and the alternative is maintaining a fork of Zig, I'd guess they'd go with Rust.

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  • Normal, emotionally stable people don’t care if the creators of a programming language disagree with them about tariffs.

    • I can't find any evidence that the creators of Zig hold the views GP seems to suggest, but I think your assertion is wrong.

      Normal, emotionally stable people do sometimes make decisions about what businesses to patronize based on the political leanings of the business owners. Same thing happens with art appreciation, movie/TV watching, and plenty of other things. Zig might not be a business, but the same rules apply.

      You may think that's foolish, and not make your decisions that way, but it's a perfectly valid way to make decisions.

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    • Normal, emotionally stable people don’t drive business towards people they disagree with politically. You see that all around the country.