Comment by afavour
6 days ago
Presumably the biggest loser in all this is Zig, I only know of the language because of Bun.
But the timescale still gives me pause… just because AI lets us convert a codebase in 6 days doesn’t mean it’s wise. There are surely a lot of downstream implications! It’s always felt a little like Bun is making up a plan as it goes along (and maybe that’s unfair), this seems to underline the point.
Zig is a great low-level language. It's much better than C, while not being so much larger as e.g. Rust or C++. AFAICT Zig does well in embedded development, and should continue to do so. Note that Zig is not even 1.0 yet.
Yeah but now they got the fame of the language that fumbled the ball because of an overly onerous anti-AI stance.
They haven't fumbled anything. One person has used AI to vibe code a rewrite of a Zig program in another language. Zig didn't gain popularity due to Bun, last I checked Bun doesn't even mention it is written in Zig on the homepage. Zig is appreciate for major improvements over C, while being simple and concise.
In addition, a core Zig developer has explained why the PR was rejected, because it would introduce non-deterministic bugs into the compiler, just to achieve a speedup Zig is already gaining thanks to recent work on the self-hosted backend and incremental compilation, which are far more general as well.
It's been repeated many times that the rejection of the Bun PR was unrelated to their AI-policy. It's also not clear they've "fumbled the ball" given how many projects are complaining about slop PRs.
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Lol. What a goofy take.
For most use cases I can’t imagine why you’d make the effort to move off C and not just go all the way to Rust.
Rust is too mainstream now. Every Zig fanboy clutches to their heart the confidence that they are still a little bit "alt" in some way.
These tools let you get a massive codebase functional in 6 days. But, presumably, there's no better language to target than Rust (in terms of safety/performance), and therefore the rest of time can be spent making the birthed-in-6-days codebase better.
But the author said "the code truly works, passing the test suite on Linux and soon other platforms" which just sounds really wise.