Comment by Capricorn2481
11 days ago
April 26th - Bun announces they used AI to fork Zig so they could make an optimization for a 4x improvement
April 27th - Zig contributor mlugg clarifies why the specific optimizations Bun did were ill advised and wouldn't have been accepted in Zig, regardless of AI use [1]
May 4 - Bun is looking into Rust as an alternative.
This, to me, seems like total whiplash. Has anyone at Bun made a statement on why they're making such dramatic changes? It seems like the lesson to internalize from mlugg is not "switch to Rust"
[1] https://lobste.rs/s/ifcyr1/contributor_poker_zig_s_ai_ban#c_...
Zig is a pre 1.0 language, subject to many breaking changes and has thousands of (stranded) issues on its GitHub.
It was always a risky proposition to use Zig, unless those persons were philosophically committed to help the language develop or die-hard fans. If not, them jumping to some other language, should not be so big of a surprise.
They may come to the conclusion that Zig is incapable of delivering on its promises or is deficient at satisfying their requirements.
> They may come to the conclusion that Zig is incapable of delivering on its promises or is deficient at satisfying their requirements
Sure, but what you're suggesting is not related to the timeline I gave. They did not determine Zig was deficient in some way. They tried to get a cheap gain, and the gain breaks parts of Zig and they didn't even realize it, and it was worse than the gain already available in Zig. That seems less like they've made a pragmatic choice about speed and more like they are doing headline based development.
What you write makes it sound like there's a pragmatic process being followed that only you are privy to, and I'd like to know what it is. Zig may be inappropriate for Bun after all, but this makes it look like they don't understand what they are doing, and the agentic coding doesn't help.
My description was pretty much on point. The authors of Bun appeared to have grown tired of Zig's "memory leaks, segfaults, and other stability issues". The statements (check their twitter/X) are not at all shocking, considering the over 3,000 stranded issues at Zig's GitHub repo.
Unless team Bun had some type of philosophical or financial allegiance to Zig, which they appear not to, it shouldn't be surprising that they jumped to some other language (Rust in this case).
> this makes it look like they don't understand what they are doing
Think it's more a matter of Zig not being able to deliver nor meet their requirements. That they may have got tired of Zig, so felt it was time to switch to something else, is their prerogative. Especially with having near unlimited tokens to blow.
I would assume that Zig was a risky choice to start with, and Rust was always lurking as a sensible option behind the corner. This probably just broke the camel's back.
It's a "you can't tell me what to do" reaction, to be honest.