Comment by fcarraldo
11 days ago
Contributors and maintainers will also be easier to find in Rust than Zig.
Zig is a great language and I want to see it succeed, but this is a prudent move for Bun.
11 days ago
Contributors and maintainers will also be easier to find in Rust than Zig.
Zig is a great language and I want to see it succeed, but this is a prudent move for Bun.
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.
This is likely irrelevant given bun has stopped taking community PR's entirely and Jarred is pitching that human contributors should be banned.
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.
https://lobste.rs/s/otxkjw/bun_js_runtime_is_being_vibe_port...
> The regular pull requests for bun are wild too: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls?q=is%3Apr+
> 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.)
Where is a source for either of these extraordinary claims?
https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284
11 replies →
Why didn't they use Rust in the first place then ? All this was true before AI
Anthropic only acquired Bun in December of last year. They weren't there in the first place, to make the decision.
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.
1 reply →
I don't think Zig is different enough from rust or any other systems language for it to matter. If you can write rust you can write Zig.
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.
Oh man. That joke takes me back.
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.
2 replies →
claude does not struggle with zig? not in my hands anyways.
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.
fwiw before today I'd heard of Zig and not Bun :D
something JS-adjacent could certainly be more known than an obscure language but are that many people using drop-in node replacements?
fwiw I knew about both but I had no idea Bun was written in Zig.
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.