Comment by sarreph
10 days ago
It is a pity that you can't make an experimental commit on an experimental branch without igniting a fire of delirium through some people who -- if they were able to put their emotional response aside for a minute and could weigh this up on the basis of merit -- would probably agree with the motivations for researching this approach.
> if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable
Every month brings new opportunities to completely abstract the process of porting code with agents, all using linguistics. What an exciting time.
For those looking for a similarly interesting (and interestingly similar) example, see Cloudflare's port of Next.js[0], "vinext", from a couple of months ago. It had some teething problems at the start but I'm using it in a few production projects now with minimal issues.
This is what it means to work on a popular project, unfortunately.
You also don't have a duty to read or respond to the social media flames. Just do the work you want to do.
If people get worked up about experimentation, that's their problem, not yours.
It’s not your problem until it becomes your problem.
4 replies →
I am a topic starter, and I had no emotional response, was just being curious. Never expected it will land at HN #1. I specifically posted the link to the first commit and not to the whole branch, because currently the prompt is the most interesting part.
The title kinda set the tone for this post.
The title is "Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust". The docs/PORTING.MD starts with "Zig → Rust porting guide"
I don't think the tone was the problem.
12 replies →
An original topic starter? I'm pretty sure that this was originally posted on X by someone else, as I commented there, and minutes after, it was copied and put here on HN with the twisted title; the original was more of a "question, surprise tone"
This topic starter. I saw a post on Twitter in "for you" feed, verified it, found an interesting bit (rewriting prompt) and started a topic on HN. Like I said, I never expected it to hit #1.
It’s annoying for the team members I suppose, but to be fair, if you’re working on a high-profile open source project, owned by one of the most hyped companies in the world, and your branches are public, it’s probably a good idea to be clear in the branch naming and supplemental files if you’re just “experimenting”.
By working in public on a popular open source project, you are communicating intent and purpose to your users and the general public through your commit messages, branch names, and documentation. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you act accordingly.
The fact someone who works on Bun is willing to create and even push a branch generated by a stochastic parrot is very telling of the direction the project is going.
Doesn't matter if it's "experimental", it's a dumb experiment that shouldn't exist.
Doesn't matter if it's "experimental", it's a dumb experiment that shouldn't exist.
Do you think the same about bitcoin? Where do you draw the line as to what programs are allowed to be written?
Why are you treating branches as if they are holy? This is all OSS, people work on this in their free time, git is got and people can use branches as they like to experiment and share their experiments with others. If you don't like the code, don't use it you damn leech.
Underplaying AI, overselling what an experimental branch is, and suggesting it's representative of the entire project, all while suggesting people shouldn't even consider new tools and methodologies. Where to start.
That's not a very constructive, nor accurate, way of trying to dismiss all concerns around bun that has been raised.
I think that was a very constructive comment about the unconstructive way people are shoe-horning other concerns about bun into this thread abut a specific aspect which itself turns out to be just an experiment that someone knee-jerk reacted to, despite several active threads already discussing those matters one of which only just fell off the front page.
While the concerns many have about Bun's potential future direction are valid IMO, of the posts on this thread the one you are criticising is one of the more constructive.
Maybe time to rethink your stance?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094745